I got hooked on “Smash,” the new show about the making of a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe. The big conflict in the show is which actress is going to play her, and the decision went all the way down to the wire in the season finale.
I finally figured out why I wasn’t especially invested in which actress played Marilyn – it’s that both of them were wrong. The thing I loved about Marilyn is that she knew she was a parody of herself, the same as Dolly Parton is. But like Dolly, she was always in on the joke, and winked at the audience to let you know.
That’s what’s missing from the show: the wink.
I think it was Ann Richards who observed that men don’t like the combination of beauty and humor in young women. Candice Bergen once said that she enjoyed finally being old enough to play Murphy Brown, because when she was young no one wanted a someone that beautiful to be witty and wicked funny. So, a wonderful tribute to Marilyn and Dolly that they manage to pull off that wink.