They Just Keep Moving the Line

Smash is an American musical-drama television series created by playwright Theresa Rebeck. It premiered in the United States on NBC on February 6, 2012. The series revolves around a fictional New York theater community making new Broadway musicals. In the first season, the focus was on the making of Bombshell, a musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. In the second season, the show was split between taking Bombshell to Broadway and the creation and mounting of a contemporary pop musical called Hit List that was about the price of fame. Other fictional musicals that were touched on for which original songs were performed include Beautiful and Liaisons. A few of the songs were written for events outside of the aforementioned musicals.

Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman wrote all but one of the songs in the first season. In the second season, they wrote all of the songs outside of Hit List, along with several Hit List songs, as will be noted below. All their songs written for the show, except for a couple where only a few lines were written, can be found listed in the ASCAP music database. The other songwriters are noted and referenced where appropriate.

The following list details the original songs featured in Smash.

"The 20th Century Fox Mambo" is an original song introduced in the second episode of the first season of the musical TV series Smash, entitled "The Callback". It was written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, but in the show's universe, it was written by songwriting team Tom Levitt (Christian Borle) and Julia Houston (Debra Messing) for their Marilyn Monroe musical Bombshell.

In the episode, Karen Cartwright (Katharine McPhee) needs to give a dance audition for the producing team as part of trying to get the role of Marilyn in Bombshell. She works with director and choreographer Derek Wills (Jack Davenport) and then performs this song with the ensemble members in front of the producing team.

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