Smash/Trivia

• Actor Allusion: Nick Jonas guest stars as Lyle West, an actor who started out on Broadway. Nick himself got his start in Les Misérables.
  • Played with in the case of Grace Gummer, who plays Eileen's daughter Katie -a humanitarian who spends most of her time helping out in remote, foreign locations. Her older sister Mamie Gummer stared in a show with a similar premise of helping out in remote locations, only as a doctor.
  • Debra Messing playing a woman living in New York whose best friend is a gay man.
  • Leigh Conroy is basically a flanderized Bernadette Peters.
• Billing Displacement: Debra Messing is top billed, but the show's real stars are Katharine McPhee and Megan Hilty. Even the poster thinks so (witness their positioning).
  • Additionally, in NBC promos for the show before it aired, Academy Award Winner Angelica Huston was often second billed, right after Debra Messing (as she is on the poster in the main section), although a number of other characters are more prominently featured than Ms. Huston's.
    • Incidentally, although the poster gives Megan Hilty and Katharine McPhee a joint "And Introducing" credit, the series itself doesn't.
• Friday Night Death Slot: Ratings circled the drain in Season 2, so starting in April, the remaining episodes aired on Saturdays instead of Tuesdays. The A.V. Club website joked that NBC not admitting that the show was a lost cause and would be cancelled was like parents claiming to a kid that their dog will be sent to a farm rather than put to sleep.
• Hey, It's That Guy!: Grace and Emmett are writing a musical produced by Morticia, directed by James Norrington, and starring Glinda.
  • Karen is dating Zafar Younis!
• Reality Subtext:
  • The adoption subplot in the first season came from Rebeck's own life.
  • Happens in-universe several times.
    • Ivy, like Marilyn Monroe, is an up and coming actress who wants to be a star, and she also has problems with prescription drugs and her mother.
    • Also happens when Michael and Julia are doing a run through of the scene before "Lexington and 52nd" when Michael goes off script. They improv the next few lines, and thus the dialogue that makes it into the play seems to apply exactly to their situation.
    • Julia is consoling Frank who is afraid he can't trust her after her affair with Michael, even if he wants to by telling him that "the good is bigger than the bad". This give shed the inspiration she needs to complete the lyrics to the final song.