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The first episode does not give us enough time to let us get to know Cartwright and Lynn, and we have gleaned little beyond the fact that nobody believes in them (tear drop) or the idea that that Cartwright has little personality and Lynn even less. There is room for both of them to grow, however.

Even more disappointing are the characters that comprise the creative team behind the Marilyn musical. Rebeck does not want to rely on types, which is nice, because clichés of theater folk, both on the creative and business side, abound. But what we get instead are characters that we don’t know at all. Producer Eileen Rand is going through a rough divorce, which is why she is pushing the Marilyn musical so quickly, since she needs a Broadway success to save her career. We know her situation, but nothing about her personality. Hopefully Anjelica Huston will have more opportunities to either be a badass hardass or to diverge from what we expect of a woman with power and money and give us something different.

The creative team is slightly more promising, mostly thanks to Debra Messing. Messing is a great sitcom actress, and it is with great relief that I note that she is able to tone down the energy quite a bit to play writer/lyricist Julia Houston, who got the most screen time in the pilot. Rebeck has said that Houston is her avatar, which is likely why she is by far the most developed character on the show thus far, with Messing doing her justice. Composer Tom Levitt (Christian Borle) and director/choreographer Derek Wills (Jack Davenport) are significantly less developed, as Rebeck is trying so hard to keep them from becoming clichés that she ends up caging them. Levitt has flashes of flamboyance, but overall is steady and kind of boring. Wills is built up by Levitt as a douchebag of epic proportions, but when we meet him he comes off as gruff and silent, and also kind of boring.

There was already a great show about life in the theater, and that was Canada’s “Slings and Arrowness,” which had the kind of outrageous comedy and occasional use of caricature that “Smash” is trying to avoid. But if “Smash” is trying to be both theatrical and grounded in reality, it needs to figure out how to strike a balance better than it has thus far. The dip into dream sequences seem at odds with what the show is trying to do, and the end of the pilot, when Cartwright and Lynn both sing as they prepare for their second audition, led me to wondering how real this scene was supposed to be, or was trying to be.

All that being said, the pilot moved quickly enough that I wasn’t bored, and the charisma of the actors - in particular Messing -was enough to make me not regret signing on to watch four more episodes. The show has lots of potential, and just because it hasn’t capitalized on it yet doesn’t mean it isn’t going to. If Rebeck can better develop the core cast and continue to build without slipping into melodrama (something that Aaron Sorkin couldn’t do in a similarly-tone show biz show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip), then “Smash” will becoming an entertaining but unspectacular show. There is a lot to build on here, but also a lot of opportunities to take it in the wrong direction, so we’ll have to see which great white way this show can take us down.

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