Let's Put Things in Perspective
Could it be possible this all happened because Mary McCormack was in tech?
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Gah, forgot about that. Honestly, there was so many red herrings left hanging and/or going nowhere. Did they ever have the writers get together at the same time to work on the same show?
I still want to know what Derek's ominous "Stick with the plan" ending of the phone call thing from the first season was supposed to mean. Also, Ivy throwing up before her first "Smash" audition. The setup seemed like either pregnancy or eating disorder.
Obviously, I enjoyed the show and there were some great things, but so much of it seemed like they just tossed a bunch of magnetic poetry pieces in the air and then went with that as a script. To be fair, I don't think it was the fault of the writers.
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I thought Ivy's upchucking was just nerves, in the spirit of "Karen thinks everything is easy breezy for Ivy-the-superiority-monster but that's because Karen is a dumb cluck" setup. I had a lot of alternative theories the first time around but when "Stick to the plan!" came to naught, I gave up on them. One thought was that Derek and Ivy were already getting it on and conspiring to put her in the role, but that would've resulted in Karen being disappointed, which we know they'd never do even if it were at the hands of villains, and I guess if due to pregnancy it would've resulted in Ivy having to lose the role anyway. Then I had some elaborate idea that maybe Dev and Derek knew each other from London and were in cahoots to promote Karen, maybe with Karen knowing. Out of all the possible outcomes, the ones we got were the most boring. I was thirsting for the actual promised "backstage intrigue" and making it up to please myself, but when all was said and done, all that was, was Ellis and Ivy. This show couldn't even manage to be a good soap opera. I thought we also knew/heard that Rebeck was responsible for the first six scripts in one go and that she didn't delegate well even after that, but having a cohesive grip on the plot didn't help any more than putting the story in the hands of another. Except for the dude who also acted on the show, as Rebecca's agent I think? His script was pretty awesome.
shareDamn, you would have made far better tv than what we got.
share Thanks; I just wanted it so badly to be interesting. Never in a million years did I believe they would have both Dev and Derek be British for no added reason. Especially Dev/Raza. When Raza is a credible singer and dancer to boot, but that doesn't matter. And especially when they told us Karen and Dev met in London, like that added anything more to the story of how these two people came to be together in NYC other than confusion. You can understand them wanting the director to be British because that's a trope, but the American press secretary to Bloomberg?! Whyyyyyyyeeeeee?!? And for Derek and Ivy as conspirators, Jack had to get my hopes up by saying that he and Megan call each other "Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth". And Jack's usually so artful in interviews too.
Oddly, I still see the puking as relatively benign. It's a pretty common thing for people to throw up when they're very nervous, you hear stories about it all the time. So it serves a few purposes: we get a sense of how very, very much Ivy wants this, how much she understands what an opportunity this is for her, because as someone who's been on stage for years and gone to a ton of auditions (including at least one we saw her sashay in for, completely in control) she can hardly walk in the door. The stakes, for her, are huge and she knows it.
Then we have Karen, who by contrast has no nerves because on the one hand, she's new and thus the stakes for her are very very low, and on the other she doesn't -understand- the stakes. And, interestingly, we're led to believe that it's the combination of these two approaches in the two girls that allows Karen to get the opportunity to shine, garner the attention, while Ivy is set up with a threat she maybe wouldn't have had.
Also, throwing up is a terrible thing to do if you're a singer, so while they didn't play this up, it's possible that Ivy would have shone brighter without a raw throat.
The fact that "pregnancy or eating disorder" were the first thoughts of a lot of people is unfortunate, and I think more down to soap expectations and tropes, rather than anything really embedded in the narrative. Bulimia actually would have been a horrendous choice all around, for reasons I won't get into, though using a pregnancy as one of the challenges against Ivy would have taken some of the onus off making Karen a raw diamond.
I took several scene study workshops with a wonderful actress who at one point took on "After the Fall," playing, of course, Arthur Miller's stand-in for Marilyn. She was terrific, but she would throw up at least three times before performing that character, even for classmates. Her own parents, she told me, were alcoholics, and while that was useful in her characterization, it brought up a lot of unresolved emotional issues.
My own first thought seeing Ivy vomiting was, "oh, poor kid, this means the world to her, I hope she gets the part, she's so right for it and the other one just isn't at all . . ."
Oh, right. So, she secretly trained a flock of sandflies.
Gah! I hate throwing up.
Good for the figure, I guess.
Not really. The problem is that digestion starts in the mouth, so even if you throw up pretty fast after eating, you've acquired calories. And it's tied into a binge/purge cycle, which means you're likely to be eating a LOT. Net result is that many people with bulimia are technically overweight (including McPhee.)
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