The Big Picture and the Closeup

Seminar starts out strong, ripping into the fabric of the business of teaching fiction writing with knife-edged one-liners and characters you love to despise; then, as the plot, the characterizations, and the theme take a hairpin turn, it emerges that, no, the teaching is not a scam after all, the students’ fiction has possibilities, and the characters are not what we thought them. All Rebeck’s hilarious savagery dissipates. Like Rebeck’s writing and show-running for the first season of TV’s Smash, it is a little too affectionate toward the business and the people in it to stay as scathing as Rebeck could and should keep it.

The Ephrons seem to have set out to make the point that on some profound level, women’s clothes are themselves, and that women’s very lives are bound up with their clothes and vice versa. But the case is not well-documented. And little of it bears the stamp of the Ephron wit. But the performances are fine.