Smash took a dive in the ratings in its second season following a showrunner change from Broadway vet Theresa Rebeck to former Gossip Girl executive producer Josh Safran. It wasn’t long until NBC moved the creatively fickle musical dramedy to Saturday nights, effectively canceling the show without physically pulling it from the schedule. In an in-depth interview with Entertainment Weekly, Safran shares his vision for what would have been Smash season 3 and comments on how season 2 turned out. I’ve pulled some quotes here (they’re posted after the break), but I recommend you jump over to EW for the full read.
The plan for season 3 in my mind was a Hollywood movie musical. It would shoot in New York. I felt like after two seasons of watching two shows full trajectories, I didn’t want to repeat the story again so I thought I would take the season off and do a movie musical still using Broadway actors, still using Broadway stages, maybe it would have even been set in the world of Broadway. Who knows because we didn’t even get that far but it would have given audiences a season to [see] a different way of muscials being put together and then you could come back to Broadway in season 4. You see the seeds that are in the finale.
It was going to be maybe Derek was going to direct it or maybe he wouldn’t direct it or Tom would direct it? And they’d need a new composer so Jimmy would compose with Julia. It’s all there. So that’s the Smash that would have been.
[Julia ending up with Michael Swift] was a season 3 Easter egg. Our goal was to bring him back and do image rehab for his character. That actually wasn’t a series finale decision. She was always going to see Michael Swift and we were going to wonder whether she was going to be with him next year. But the way in which that happened changed. Initially she was going to bump into him at the Tonys and they were going to have an interaction in which she was very happy to see him and he wasn’t happy to see her. So it was going to be a reversal of season one and for season 3 she was going to find out that she had to work with him but he didn’t want anything to do with her and she was still in love with him.
We were interested in a season 3 idea of Tom working with this man [Patrick Dillon] who he was in love with and [who] was in love with him but who wasn’t out. So he finally found the relationship that worked but there was this huge stumbling block.
We realized that Ivy would have still been in Bombshell so she would not have been able to do the movie and she would have been pregnant. The idea would have been to still have been following Broadway with Eileen, sort of like a B-story while following the movie on the A-side and watching how Eileen made the jump like some theatrical producers have done into film. But Eileen was going to be our way to still stay in the theater. One of the things we talked about was creating a powerful film producer who was going to be her love interest, sort of a Harvey Weinstein.