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“The show is having trouble finding its footing” was one of my main criticisms of Smash when I reviewed its pilot. This would prove to be fairly portentous as five episodes in I have no idea where the show is trying to go. You would think that the production of a broadway musical would be ripe for drama, but Smash is either having difficulty mining that drama or is so distracted by the peripheral stories of the characters that it is letting good stuff fall through the cracks. Whichever it is doing, and sometimes it feels like it switches between both flaws multiple times through any given episode, the show's good moments feel drowned out by its many issues.

Smash is clearly going to be a show that is driven by its characters, not its action, which is a difficult task, considering it will have to make every character arc work not only for every episode but over the course of the season. So far it is not accomplishing either of those goals, and looking at what the show has attempted to do with each character makes it clear why, after five episodes, Smash still feels like its revving its engine while stuck in neutral.

I had high hopes for what was to come of the professional rivalry between Karen and Ivy when I wrote “their relationship can go in a million different directions, and the potential they have is one of the most intriguing aspects of the show.” How disappointing, then, that the show has decided to turn Ivy into the villain, making her catty, manipulative, cruel, and totally unsympathetic. Megan Hilty is a very good stage actress, which means that every emotion is played as big as possible. This means that when she is playing Ivy playing Marilyn she kills, but when she is just playing Ivy she overplays every emotion. Katherine McPhee, on the other hand, never does much with her character, which makes Karen thoroughly sympathetic but not that interesting.

Debra Messing, meanwhile, could stand as a monument to wasted potential. After spending the first two episodes focused on her and her husband's issues with adoption, that plotline seems to have been dropped entirely and the husband hasn't showed up since. Instead she walks around the entire third episode practically holding a sign that reads “I slept with the guy playing Joe DiMaggio” before she finally admits it, which is supposed to be shocking, I guess. This plotline represents everything that is wrong with Smash thus far. It is all talk, trying to create drama without having anything actually happen. True, at the end of this week's episode Julia and Michael kiss, but the moment felt so manufactured - mostly because of the truly awful song that preceded it - that it merited little more than a shrug as a reaction.

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