The NBC musical drama series Smash was supposed to transform TV as we know it when it premiered in February 2012.
The show, executive produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Debra Messing and Anjelica Huston about the behind-the-scenes creation of a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe, did no such thing. It was a train wreck from start to finish, including for the show’s creator Theresa Rebeck, who was fired after the first season.
Aside from brief comments to the New York Observer, Rebeck has maintained her silence until now. In what can only be described as an epic rant, Rebeck says sexism was a major factor in her firing from her big break as a TV showrunner.
In the chapter entitled What Came Next, from the upcoming book Double Bind: Women On Ambition (edited by Robin Romm), Rebeck writes: “At the end of the first season, I was fired without cause…as the dust settled, it became clear that at the management level a lot of dastardly stories had been invented about my character.”
“Was it gender based?,” she asks about her firing. “It sure felt like it. The power structure included ten men and one woman, and in spite of all their second-guessing and wrangling, the show was terrific until they fired the woman in charge.”
Rebeck has had three plays staged on Broadway, and has written scripts for the short-lived ABC series Of King and Prophets and the legal drama The Divide.
But the wounds from Smash evidently linger: “The person they gave it to [Josh Safran from Gossip Girl] had virtually no credentials and no experience in the theater. His television credits were nowhere near as comprehensive as mine. The show died under his watch.
“Two years later, another network gave him another show to run. Meanwhile, I was still being told that I was unemployable because everyone knew that I was a lunatic.”
Rebeck reflects, “I felt cheated by what had happened on Smash, and I was determined that the men who had cheated me would not have the last word on my talent and my character. It p***ed me off that the men at my level who had been fired in similarly ridiculous circumstances somehow managed to bounce upward.
“I felt like what had happened to me was yet another version of the recklessly hideous way so many talented women are treated—silenced, kicked to the curb.”
She adds how Spielberg himself bears some of the responsibility for her departure: “Mr. Spielberg, to give him much credit, called me the day I was fired and apologized. He told me that he blamed himself. He felt that the politics had gotten way out of hand, and they wouldn’t have if he had been around more. He was probably right.
“And, of course, as soon as I was fired, all the men who had conspired to have me removed from my post realized that the show wasn’t going to survive without me and so they slunk away and went off to do other things.”
Then she adds: “When I was fired from the show I created, my soon-to-be-ex agent told me that the President of NBC had a ‘comfort level’ issue with me.
“Comfort level, I came to learn, is Hollywood code for men who don’t want to work with women. So women, who are suspect because there is this comfort level issue, have to work extra hard to play well with others and manage up, in addition to sucking everything up and understanding that things are going to be handed to the guys, and then they’re going to tell a lot of sexist jokes and tell you to your face that you’re supposed to be writing the girl scenes because they’re too busy writing about shooting people and blowing things up and other utter bull***t.”
According to Rebeck, the men “seemed to think I was some kind of factotum, or typewriter even”. She further notes that TV showrunners can behave like “tin-pot dictators” operating in a culture of “institutionalized despotism”.
She’s not done there: “One time I got fired from a show because the show runner put poop jokes into one of my scripts, and it offended the star of the show… the misogyny is beyond anything that people believe when I tell these stories.
“On my first job in television, when I was in my twenties, I would sit, dazed, while a roomful of men sat around and told fist-up-the-ass jokes, roaring with laughter.”
The truth about Rebeck’s time on Smash is likely more complex than her chapter in Double Bind, which is published on April 11, would have us believe.
A detailed Buzz Feed investigation into Smash published in 2013 reported that “under Rebeck very quickly it just turned into kind of like—a kingdom or something. A dictatorship.” The article alleged “Rebeck fought with everyone” and quoted another source saying “she was prone to screaming”.
One thing is for sure. Rebeck’s bombastic recollection is way more entertaining than anything seen in Smash.
