Is there a way to bypass a component in series in a circuit if that component fails?
It's possible in certain circumstances but generally not. In your speaker example imagine what would happen when there is no sound being transmitted: all series speakers would short out and the amplifier is now driving a short-circuit.

Filament bulb series-connected Christmas tree lights have a mechanism whereby failed bulbs are shorted out. Truebeard's Stumper explains this mechanism:


  [Inside the bulb there is a shunt resistor.] It consists merely of a piece of OXIDIZED aluminum wire, wrapped around the lead-in wires, just above the bead in the lamp. At normal operating voltage (2.5 volts for 50-100 light sets ...), the oxide coating acts as an insulator, and the current goes through the filament. But when a lamp burns out, There is an OPEN CIRCUIT, and, in all series wiring, that puts the FULL LINE VOLTAGE across the defective lamp, and the 120 volts will "BURN" through the extremely thin oxide coating on the shunt, causing the shunt to actually short the lamp out. (This is exactly the same effect as twisting the lamp to short the wires together!) This completes the circuit, and the set lights.


Note that this increases the voltage applied to the rest of the set and an accelerating cascade of bulb failures will (eventually) follow.

Another example you can research is runway lighting. Rather than parallel all the lamps, which would result in gradual voltage drop along the runway, the lamps are fed from transformers and the transformer primaries are series connected and a controlled current sent down the line. You can research this yourself to see how faults are handled.

In general your scheme isn't going to work. Shorting out series connected loads means that the remaining loads get higher voltage than they should and damage will ensue. In addition there is the problem of how to energise the switch to reset the device on power-on. If the device has shorted itself out there is no way for it to power itself back on.