Joshua Safran Reveals What Would Have Been for SMASH Season 3!

Now that NBC has aired the final episode of SMASH, fans can't help but wonder what would have been if the network had renewed the musical drama series for a third season. In an interview with EW.com, executive producer Joshua Safran, who replaced the series creator Theresa Rebeck, reveals what he had planned for the series if it had the opportunity to return this fall.

"The plan for season 3 in my mind was a Hollywood movie musical. It would shoot in New York," shared the showrunner. "I felt like after two seasons of watching two shows full trajectories, I didn't want to repeat the story again so I thought I would take the season off and do a movie musical still using Broadway actors, still using Broadway stages, maybe it would have even been set in the world of Broadway."

He continues, " it would have given audiences a season to [see] a different way of muscials being put together and then you could come back to Broadway in season 4. You see the seeds that are in the finale."

Safran even had the production team in mind for the fictional film project. "...Derek was going to direct it or maybe he wouldn't direct it or Tom would direct it? And they'd need a new composer so Jimmy would compose with Julia. It's all there. So that's the SMASH that would have been."

Yet the exec confirms that the original Broadway theme would still be present if a third season had been filmed. "We realized that Ivy would have still been in Bombshell so she would not have been able to do the movie and she would have been pregnant. The idea would have been to still have been following Broadway with Eileen, sort of like a B-story while following the movie on the A-side and watching how Eileen made the jump like some theatrical producers have done into film. But Eileen was going to be our way to still stay in the theater. One of the things we talked about was creating a powerful film producer who was going to be her love interest, sort of a Harvey Weinstein."

In the end, Safran was content with the outcome of Season Two. "I'm really proud of it," he maintains. "It is very close to the pitch that I came in with. Of course it was a very steep learning curve. I was learning up until the last day, as was everybody. There's definitely stuff that we would have worked through in season 3 but I'm very proud of the show and I always will be and I'm glad it exists so I got to be a part of it.

Read the interview in full here!

Photo credit: Will Hart/NBC