You are close:
Boy meets girl.
Boy loves girl.
Boy writes songs for girl to sing in his show.
Girl steals song and becomes star on her own.
Diva shoots girl.
Add to that:
Cheap set.
Costumes by “Emperor’s New Clothes, Inc.”
Artsy-fartsy staging.
Hype.
NY Times and hipsters love it.
“The use of cell phones and other recording devices is not only permitted, it’s encouraged. Record the show in its entirety for all we care. We don’t own it any more than you do.”
At least they recognize the value of Hit List. 
I thought she promised to do Gatsby with JLM’s character? Plus, musicals and plays are fairly different animals. 
At least he got to sing. And it may turn out that somebody just through a large flashlight-cam at him.
And, IIRC, his previous singing scene earlier in the season was almost exactly the same–a “reverse POV” shot of him walking through the streets singing with great angst.
The ending of this episode reminded me of a satirical article by Michael O’Donoghue in an old issue of National Lampoon magazine entitled, “How to Write Good”:
Lesson 2 - The Ending
All too often, the budding author finds that his tale has run its course and yet he sees no way to satisfactorily end it, or, in literary parlance, “wrap it up.” Observe how easily I resolve this problem:
Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck. -the end-
If the story happens to be set in England, use the same ending, slightly modified:
Suddenly, everyone was run over by a lorry. -the end-
If set in France:
Soudainement, tout le monde etait écrasé par un camion. -finis-
You’ll be surprised at how many different settings and situations this ending applies to. For instance, if you were writing a story about ants, it would end “Suddenly, everyone was run over by a centipede.” In fact, this is the only ending you ever need use.*
*Warning - if you are writing a story about trucks, do not have the trucks run over by a truck. Have the trucks run over by a mammoth truck.
I don’t know… I kind of like the wandering-on-stage thing.
Hey! Kyle gets to sing! And his voice is good!
::smash::
Bastards!
And why THE HELL did he go back to his brother’s house? Can’t you go to a damn motel or someplace else, asshole? Bah!
And they’ve been too nice to Ivy recently. I’m guessing she gets devoured by flying monkeys next episode or something.
It’s very convenient that Kyle’s family is in town on the day he gets hit by a truck. That will make the funeral (where I’m sure Karen and Jimmy will sing the most self involved duet in the world) that much easier to schedule.
So - with four episodes left, I’d like to see Jesse L. Martin and Daphne Rubin-Vega do a duet. It need not make any more sense than the rest of the show. If it could somehow be followed by another solo by Bernadette Peters, that would also be nice.
Maybe Jesse L. Martin will sing A Thousand Sweet Kisses for Kyle which will so move him he’ll rise from the coffin and join the dancers on the trapeze above him. At the funeral Tom and Julia will realize that life is too short to end a friendship over a petty argument so they’ll have a much bigger argument instead, which ends when Eileen tosses what she thinks is a drink on them but turns out to be hydrofluoric acid that was switched for the drink by Ellis. In the hysterical singing that follows Ivy loses her voice and Karen has to go on as Marilyn in a show that goes well until Bernadette Peters reveals at intermission that Karen is in fact the daughter she gave up for adoption while traveling through Iowa on her way to become a star.
Umm, as a writer on the show, are you allowed to reveal all these details before the episode airs?
How dare you insult the good name of Sampiro by calling him such a vile name as “writer on the show” Smash!?
If he were a writer, chances are quite good this show would have stellar ratings instead of swirling clockwise down the toilet…
Was that really Kyle singing? The voice seemed too, I don’t know, full? rounded? to be him.
Tom and Julia deserve each other. Their little spat onstage could have been lifted from a Three’s Company script, it was so bad.
I could have sworn they were going to reveal that Ivy’s popping the pills again, considering her crazy busy schedule, her obvious exhaustion, and the fact that she was perky and bubbly at the end of the day.
And Karen’s about to give it up to Derek.
Just when you think this show can not become any more of a maudlin mess … it does.
Please, god, make it stop.
That said, you know what the biggest single problem with the show is? It’s that Katherine McPhee can’t act. There’s a big ol’ empty space where the character of Karen is supposed to be, and it throws off the gravity of the entire thing.
Seriously – it’s not the writing, it’s McPhee. The rest of the cast could carry off the whole thing as some kind of meta whatever if there were an iota of believability about Karen.
I don’t know how you can say that when there’s a three minute segment of asshole boy dream sing-stalking himself through the streets of New York - and it was one of the better segments of the episode. (the AV Club review is hilarious)
This is not to say that Katherine McPhee isn’t awful, because she is. But she’s the worst part of a bad show not the bad part of an otherwise ok show.
But Bernadette Peters sang half of a song, so at least I got to see that!
When brat asshole was sitting on the ledge, my SO and I were both yelling, “Jump! Jump! Jump!”
Sadly, that didn’t happen.
Steven Spielberg is not stupid - but why did he stop reading the scripts, or at least pay someone with a brain to read them, during the production of this show?!
I can’t think of a single good thing to say about this episode, other than it ended.
I was hoping Karen would push him off.
Why did I watch this? So I could enjoy the AV Club post. Thanks for posting that, amarinth!
In an episode filled with the stupid, one moment that stood out for me was when they were going to honor Kyle by doing the show as a concert- basically performing all of the music in chairs with music stands. But the music was Jimmy’s, and Kyle wrote the book. So how does it honor Kyle to do an evening of his partner’s work and ignoring his own?
My understanding of Hit List was that it is an all or almost all sung musical, in which there is almost no straight dialogue. Kyle presumably wrote the lyrics, and came up with the storyline, so singing through the show honors his work. More importantly, this is basically just the Rent story.
Kyle wasn’t a well developed character, which might explain why he he was one of the few you didn’t actively dislike (other than his being unfaithful to his real boyfriend while being pathetically in love with A-hole and, to paraphrase AV Club, untalented as a playwright until suddenly he was talented). If you were to make a list of the characters you wouldn’t mind seeing killed off he’d be in the “good line”, which I suppose is why they chose him, but they should let Tom spank him in the flashback since it’s their last chance they’ll get.
Agreed with AV on the Anjelica/Eileen throwing drinks: when it’s in the credits, it’s over.
There are several definitions of bathos, but one is “insincere pathos; sentimentality; mawkishness”, which I think describes this episode perfectly. It made me imagine Lindsay Bluth trying to cry.