Greenblatt began as the entertainment chairman at NBC in early 2011, after its parent company, NBC Universal, was taken over by Comcast. The network had been down so long, it had become a punch line. One bad season had followed another. After the Jay Leno/Conan O'Brien disaster, which played out in an ugly, public, embarrassing way the previous year, it seemed like the once-No. 1 network might never recover its good name, especially in the creative community.

Then the well-respected Greenblatt arrived. As an executive at Fox in the '90s, he'd had a hand in beloved series such as Party of Five and The X-Files; later, as an independent producer, HBO's Six Feet Under was one of his shows. Then, as the entertainment president at Showtime for six years, he turned the identity-less HBO imitator into a prestigious, growing pay-cable channel. NBC was lucky to get him.

In addition to his talents as a television executive, Greenblatt is a devoted theater geek. While at Showtime, he also produced a theatrical adaptation of 9 to 5 with Dolly Parton, which had a short Broadway run in 2009. Greenblatt originally bought Smash for Showtime in November 2009. It had been Spielberg's idea; the star director wanted to create a scripted series about a musical, and if all went well, the fictional musical would actually be developed as a real one on Broadway. It was an ambitious project.

When Greenblatt went to NBC, he brought Smash with him. Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, the producing team who specialize in musical theater adaptations for film and television, were already in place as executive producers; Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, Tony winners for Hairspray, were also on board to write Smash's original music. With Glee having so much success at Fox, the timing seemed perfect for a show for adults about the behind-the-scenes drama of making a Broadway musical.

Rebeck had been involved since Smash's inception as well. Though mainly known as an accomplished playwright, she had spent time in television too, writing for NYPD Blue, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and other shows. For years, Rebeck had wanted to create a TV series about a Broadway production, and no one had ever bitten. Then she was hired to do exactly that on Smash. According to a story in Variety by Cynthia Littleton, it was Rebeck's off-Broadway play The Understudy, a backstage satire about how theater has been ruined by stunt-casting and celebrity, that sold Spielberg on her.

"It was pretty exciting when they came looking for me," Rebeck told Littleton.

Once Greenblatt got to NBC, Smash became a reality. The cast included a television star (Debra Messing), notable theater actors like Christian Borle and Megan Hilty (who had been in Greenblatt's 9 to 5), American Idol finalist Katharine McPhee for novelty, and an Oscar-winning movie star, Anjelica Huston. The pilot was filmed a few months after Greenblatt started his new job, for a reported $7.5 million. It was directed by Michael Mayer, who had won the Tony for Spring Awakening, but had never directed television before. At Greenblatt's first upfront presentation in May 2011, when the broadcast networks unveil their new shows to advertisers and the press, he announced that Smash would premiere in midseason and be paired with the second season of the surprise hit The Voice.

No work of popular fiction receives unanimous acclaim. But the pilot for Smash, sent out to journalists shortly after the up-fronts, got a ton of early love from critics, and deservedly so. It set up a world full of compelling characters. Messing and Borle played Julia and Tom, a successful team of songwriters who are also best friends; they begin to write a musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, providing the plot's engine. Hilty and McPhee were two very different ingénue characters — Hilty's Ivy was the seasoned actress/singer who had been in a thousand choruses and needs her big break, while McPhee's Karen was the naïve Iowa transplant just starting out. Eileen Rand (Huston) was a big-shot producer who has to show she can have a hit without her ex-husband/ex-business partner, and Jack Davenport played Derek, the star director who is also a sexual predator when it comes to casting. The music was a combination of pop covers (McPhee sang Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful" during an audition scene) and original songs, topped off by the catchy "Let Me Be Your Star," a duet and duel between Ivy and Karen as they both audition for the part of Marilyn in Tom and Julia's nascent musical. "Let Me Be Your Star" literally stops the show — as the song crescendos, the pilot ends on a cliff-hanger: Which actress will be Marilyn? It was exciting.

A show as complicated as Smash — with multiple musical numbers every week that needed to look and sound professional, in addition to the requirements of any television drama (an engaging plot and characters) — had to be run meticulously. Any television series can go off the rails if the showrunner loses control, or, conversely, controls too much — if his or her ideas turn out to be bad ones. A creator with aggressive convictions about what the show is or should be is not rare in television, nor is it necessarily a bad thing for a show that has so many non-writers in producing roles. The issues occur when that person creates a show with obvious, worsening problems and won't listen to anyone else — and that is what happened with Rebeck.

A source who worked on Season 1 of Smash said, "Very quickly it just turned into kind of like — a kingdom or something. A dictatorship."