Anyone else kept up with this show, like me? I still like it. Karen is boring, love to hate and admire Ivy, Love Tom and Julia... Eileen is probably my favorite character to watch, always interesting. The tangled web they've woven themselves has me captivated in a nervous-but-I-can't-stop-watching way.

Well...the sesaon finale came and went and...really, Derek just bulldozed over everyone to get Karen the lead? I mean she was very good, but I couldn't help but agree with everyone else that Ivy should've got it - even that douche Ellis. Loved that song at the end...and I guess we can say that Julia's pregnant (woah baby drama XD), and poor Ivy....those pills (as melodramatically symbolic as they are) don't predict many happy plot developments of her, at least at the beginning.

And did anyone else feel a little unclean when Derek told Dev that Karen was "his"? *shudder* I as much as I hate Derek...I kinda love hom too. He's just so fascinating at points and in scenes like that and at the end. I mean I know he's probably going to try the casting couch with Karen again...and I kinda want him to succeed.

I'm sorry, McPhee is decent and all, but I can't by her playing Marilyn so well on such short notice or being Derek's magice muse, as much as I like where that idea is going, even if it is rather creepy. The only point where I think it works was the very first episode where Karen goes to his apartment and throws him for a loop with the sexy Happy Birthday and leaves. THAT I could see drawing him to her, The One That Got Away, so to speak.

Anyway, what do you guys think of the show so far?

Now, I have only watched the finale in full, so apologies if I'm being totally ignorant to any storylines and the like. However, didn't it originally appear that the point of the show was to get the musical up in production and to figure out the lead drama between McPhee and Hilty? Well, the show went up, and McPhee got the lead. ...now what? What do they do for a season 2?

Well, the show's only in Boston for tryouts. They haven't hit Broadway yet, so they still have that to work out, and I'm guessing they're still going to ahve issues with brigning on an unknown in the lead. Than there's all the character stuff - Julia's pregnancy, Ivy's potential suicide attempt...Ellis' promise of revenge...I'm sure they'll come with something to keep the series going for at least another season.

Meh. I thought McPhee was okay, but I just don't think she has the star quality that Marylin Monroe had, that Megan Hilty has. And I hate that Derek's opinion is taken as fact. When he told Ivy that Karen has something she doesn't. Sure, she has an innocence. But definitely not a star's presence. Ivy does. Maybe it's actually Megan's fault for being too good? But I just don't buy that she'd be repeatedly overlooked for the role. At all.

And as far as next season is concerned, there'll be plenty of drama. Karen will be overwhelmed and bomb on opening night. Ivy will go on. Be sensational. They'll question whether to replace Karen with her. Same old, same old, same old.

Or who knows, maybe the rivalry is finally over? Maybe McPhee just IS Marilyn? And then we see the repercussions of that. Dunno.

P.S. I thought the ending song would have been that much better had the final notes been the same as "Let Me Be Your Star". Am I the only one?

My favorite performer on the show by far is Raza Jaffrey. He is suuuuuuuuuuuch a good actor. It's too bad that his character got really annoying halfway through the season. I remember seeing him onstage at the Haymarket back in the late '90s and thinking he was amazing. I hope he gets better stuff to do in Season 2.


To be truthful, I don't find either Hilty or McPhee to be particularly compelling. I wish they had gotten a really brilliant actress to play Marilyn, like Kelli O'Hara or Kate Baldwin.

kate baldwin would have been excellent. i watched the first few episodes and then got boared and annoyed by the dumbing down of the process for the 'average' veiwer.

Woah, woah, woah. You mean for Uma's role, right? Both actresses are far too old to play rookies. And Baldwin is the furthest thing from a Marylin type.

Besides, I'm sorry, both actresses are too homely. They're stage beauties, not screen. The camera does not love everyone. Megan Hilty's even pushing it sometimes...and I am NOT talking about her body.

Prepare yourself for a lot of spoilers and commetns and such, I just watched the entire season over four days.

*Debra Messing's entire character annoys me for some reason. I don't feel she particularly acts it well and I don't feel nearly as sympathetic for her as I should (in fact the only time I felt somewhat sympathetic for her was DURING her affair, which I feel Theresa Rebeck wanted us to have been pissed off at).

*I feel like about 1/3rd of the way through the season, I feel like McPhee's character didn't really fight for her motivations any more and just sort of went with what happened, and the direction for her suddenly went very one dimensional (Mr. Record Producer Person, why you only had an arc that lasted two episodes I don't know, and why was there almost NO fallout from her decision whatsoever).

*Just about the only character I found compelling was Eileen, because the acting and the way her character went simply just appeared the most interesting. She arguably has the highest stakes, certainly financially as well as redefining her career, and she definitely for me was the biggest positive of the show.

*I'm not sure what I think of Megan Hilty's character. At times I feel like her performances in some of the rehearsals/workshop settings are...not as good as the show's creators wants us to think they are, whether that attributes to the show within the show or Hilty herself I don't know, my instinct is a little bit of both. The way her character went at the end was kind of...strange. I knew that she'd attempt suicide at the end because of my own peek at the last episode prior to this, but it seemed like up until the last episode the origin of the attempt might have had something to do with the combined fall out of ruining the engagement, Derek basically leaving her, etc., but it seemed like based on the scene with Bernadette Peters that it was almost exclusively based on not getting Marilyn which seems...not 28 year old like (that's about how old Ivy is in the show roughly, yes?).

*For a show that wants to accurately portray the creation of a Broadway musical with Broadway music...why were half of the musical numbers the cast covering pop songs at bars and Times Square and other odd places as such?

*The guy who played Joe DiMaggio before he jumped ship for the pilot...did we even learn his name or anything about him? Why in a show that emphasizes the push for the big characters do you ignore a guy who was just handed the male lead about half way through the season.

And now, my thoughts on how accurate I think the show was in recreating the process:

*Um Katherine McPhee's initial audition...why? Why was that accepted? The song choice didn't allow for any action to play, even if she found something in the lyrics she created no character with no objectives...um...why was this accepted as a great audition by all? Why?

*I feel if the show were being even remotely realistic, and you figure each season represented a year at the most, even at the rushed pace it seemed like Eileen was having I have a feeling a Boston tryout wouldn't have happened for at least three years after the composers started writing the musical, hell even the first audition probably wouldn't have happened until the musical was finished which I suspect with drafts and everything would take at LEAST a year.

*I understand actors being gossipy and rude, sleeping with the right people, and envying parts in front of each other. I do NOT understand people committing attempted murder of Uma Thurman in order to "save the show," the show's lyricist accepting or denying an actor to play a role, and the director randomly hiring the lead singer of OneRepublic to rewrite songs even though with copyright he'd probably get sued out of his ass.

*Speaking of the director, I feel like they really don't show enough of the grind of the rehearsal process on everybody. How exhausting dance calls can be, how to hit the notes in the chorus with enough energy, how finding the emotional event for your character can put a lot on an actor and the director, and I got almost NONE of that through this show, instead I get questions of if the song is "good" or not and how he finds McPhee as Marilyn just by looking at her even though she has very few Marilyn-esque moments in her acting and by casting her because he "sees Marilyn in her", he's basically type casting even though not type casting was the reason she got attention in the first place. They also never showed the hours of script analysis and production meetings that are essential for the director. As an aspiring director, a lot of these things I saw almost pissed me off a bit.

*Speaking of production staff, no portrayal of any potential drama between artistic staff and lighting/set/costume designers? In any production I've been a part of with big scale design elements, there has always been a little bit of such drama, but they don't even bother portraying the potential problems?

*This is just more personal taste, but I actually found a lot of the show within a show numbers...not that good. I'm not technically skilled to say whether the songs are actually good or bad musical theatre but very few were memorable except for "Let Me Be Your Star" and even then I'm not sure if that song knows what it even is.

*More nit-picky in the scheme of things but the way the stage manager was portrayed I found entirely inaccurate in her lack of strictness and control over the room. It's a shame the character wasn't the greatest because I love Ann Harada.

Phew. Think that's all I have for now, if you want to talk points with me about this stuff, go ahead, I'm open.

This especially. She was only even seen in one of the episodes I've seen so far, but the one I saw was very unrealistic. The big-name star sending the STAGE MANAGER to get her smoothie/chips/whatever it was? Um, no. The stage manager has a rehearsal to run. Although that wasn't happening, so I guess they just wanted to give her something to do?

That was stupid and annoying. It was like Glee. Not trying to compare the two, but a Glee club is not limited to just broadway songs. A show about a broadway musical should be. And what happened with the recording contract?


Why did they hire so many Broadway actors without using them for their voices?


There's no way in hell she would have been hired in the first place. She couldn't sing, act, and she looked less like marylin than McPhee, and that's saying something.


I think the problem was that the songs were kinda generic. But I did love "Second Hand White Baby Grand" the one that Megan Hilty sang in episode 12. That was beautiful.

Megan Hilty's character isn't supposed to be a rookie. She's been on Broadway for at least 10 years. Kate Baldwin would make a perfect Marilyn, she would be wonderfully vampy and funny while still having pathos. I don't know what you mean by homely, either.




You'd also be surprised at what a wig and makeup can do. Michelle Williams is a very plain-looking woman but she looked enough like Marilyn in the movie.