Smash - Hell on Earth

What happened - Karen lands a national orange juice commercial that Ivy was going to audition for. Ivy is back in Heaven on Earth, but she is still on her prescription medications. She takes nearly a whole bottle, goes on stage, and makes a huge fool out of herself. Karen is watching the performance in the wings, waiting to give Ivy her sunglasses back. Ivy is upset that Karen saw her fail, but they go into Times Square together, drink, and sing along with the street performers (Rihanna’s "Cheers (I’ll Drink to That)").

Eileen, Derek, Tom, and Julia work to come up with a name for the show and cast a movie star as Marilyn. Frank finds sheet music for a love song that Julia wrote for Michael. She tries to act like it’s just a song, but Frank sensed something at the workshop and already suspects Julia of cheating. Julia comes clean. Frank storms off and confronts Michael the next day. Michael accidentally tells Frank that the affair happened twice. Frank punches Michael and ends up moving out.

Ellis tries to get a producing credit by securing a movie star to play Marilyn. The movie star is named Rebecca Duvall and will be played by future guest star Uma Thurman. Tom finds out that his boyfriend is a Republican and struggles with that news. He finally accepts it and attends a political fundraiser for his boyfriend’s former roommate. Finally, Julia and Tom pick a name for the musical: Bombshell.

Comments - Frank had better be back to sing a real song, dammit. Ern is obsessed with his voice, especially in The Wild Party. Him messing around and trying to seduce his wife last week didn’t count. It almost counted that he sang Julia’s song at the piano, but that was more the show teasing us than actually showing us how well this guy can sing. He’s better than anyone else who has sung on this show, we’ll tell you that. If he comes back, the song he sings had better show him off properly. Sadly, we will still have to look at him while he sings, and that may ruin it.

We were impressed that Frank figured out that Julia was cheating. He’s smarter than the caveman he looks like. We are glad he finally found out, but their fight was a hard scene to watch. We don’t even care about these characters and that was really sad. We wanted to tell Frank to relax, because it wasn’t even hot cheating. “Bro, like, if there were a TV audience watching, no one would have even been titillated.” It was also sad that Julia didn’t talk to Leo about her cheating after he found out. With his attitude, it probably would have been a disaster, but as a parent, she should have tried.

None of the songs were any good this week. Last week’s awful episode featured that pop song by Kat McPhee playing slutty, and that was catchy. But it wasn’t good and it was so out of place in the show. We like that Ivy and Karen are back on the same footing. With both of them as underdogs, maybe their characters will be used better. We are still digging the idea of both of them ending up as Marilyn, with Karen playing her before fame and Ivy playing the icon version. We sympathized mildly with Tom. Believe it or not, dating someone with different politics than you can cause problems. Good luck electing a gay Republican in New York…or anywhere, for that matter.

We finally got to see Heaven on Earth. Ivy’s meltdown was funny, and we thought it was a great burn when Karen told Ivy that Derek wanted to sleep with her (Karen) first. We liked them as friends. We know it wouldn’t be as interesting if the ice fully thawed between them, but they had great friendship chemistry last night. We are sick of Karen being so perfect, so it was nice to see her fight back a little bit. We like the title of the musical, but we wish Smash had made the musical about something other than Marilyn Monroe, which has been done to death. It’s too late now.

Episode grade: B