This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for music. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "A Thousand and One Nights" Smash song – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "A Thousand and One Nights" Smash song – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

"A Thousand and One Nights" is an original song introduced in the twelfth episode of the first season of the musical TV series Smash, entitled "Publicity". It was written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman,^[1] but in the episode, it's presented as a character's fantasy of a Bollywood musical number so the songwriter is unnamed.

In the episode, Karen Cartwright (Katharine McPhee and her boyfriend Dev (Raza Jaffrey) are having a tense dinner with movie star Rebecca Duvall (Uma Thurman) at an Indian restaurant. Rebecca has taken over as the lead in the Marilyn Monroe musical Bombshell, while Karen is her understudy. However, Rebecca has taken Karen out for quite a bit of partying, which has caused tensions between Karen and Dev. During the meal, Rebecca and Dev start to argue about who is the one harming Karen. An uncomfortable Karen starts watching a Bollywood movie on one of the screens, and then imagines herself in a Bollywood-style movie with first Dev, then herself singing the song, with practically the entire rest of the main cast and various supporting players of the series performing as backup. The song is sung in the style of an Indian Bollywood song, with the performers dressed in Indian clothes.

TV Is My Pacifier described the number as "all kinds of wrong. I understood how Karen wanted to go to a happy place when a friend and your boyfriend are fighting over you like you aren’t there. But apart from that, the clip of the song was just all kinds of wrong. And I thought Raza Jaffrey got lost in the dancing, while Katherine McPhee did a terrific job."^[2]