★★★★★ 0/5

Nashville

Connie Britton & Hayden Panettiere are perfectly cast as rivals in this broadly-appealing backstage drama.

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2014-01-18_2341It’s been very heartening to see music dramas being embraced by television in recent years.

Ever since the success of American Idol and the films Moulin Rouge and Chicago, the small screen has renewed its affection for the genre: Glee and Smash in particular. After the failure of Viva Laughlin it was looking like it would never be revived for a while.

In 2012 ABC (US) produced Nashville, a country and western themed drama starring Connie Britton and Hayden Panettiere, which attracted considerable acclaim. It’s taken a long time to reach our screens but it finally begins on SoHo this week.

Not unlike Smash, this is a drama with two female leads in opposite corners, peppered with original songs throughout the narrative.

Britton plays Rayna Jaymes, a Bonnie Raitt-style performer whose grip on fame is beginning to slide. With rising expenses and an affluent lifestyle, she’s told to curb her spending and to find a younger audience by touring with rising teen sensation Juliette Barnes (Panettiere) -a perky Taylor Swift-style act with an arrogant temper. Their record company want to create a win / win by pairing the two on the road.

But Jaymes is dead set against the idea, while Barnes only has eyes on Jaymes’ lead guitarist Deacon Claybourne (Charles Esten) to join her own band. Claybourne, whose own compositions have been rejected by Jaymes, records them with the flirtatious young Barnes. He tries to remain loyal to Jaymes and it emerges that both have a romantic past despite her ‘settling’ for husband Theodore ‘Teddy’ Conrad (Eric Close), currently running for Nashville Mayor.

Both Rayna and Juliette have troubled relationships with their parents. Jaymes’ wealthy father Lamar Wyatt (Powers Boothe) has never approved of his daughter’s music career, while Barnes’ mother Jolene (Sylvia Jefferies) is drug-addicted white-trash, stalking her daughter and begging for money.

Claybourne’s niece Scarlett O’Connor (Clare Bowen) also shows promise as an emerging performer in a cafe, pairing with guitarist Gunnar Scott (Sam Palladio). They serve as a nice subplot against the antics in the foreground.

It has to be said the three leads, Connie Britton, Hayden Panettiere and Charles Esten are perfectly cast in their respective roles.

We feel for Britton’s Jaymes as a woman with integrity under pressure. Panettiere is aptly cold but with an unstoppable talent and curves in all the right places. Rugged Esten is the object of desire, without any pretensions, and caught in a tug of war by two competitive females.

All three also perform the vocals on dozens of original songs, most of which are presented in performance-style scenes (concerts, recording studios, rehearsals etc). Nevertheless they often reflect the larger drama of the plot.

Nashville‘s romantic drama makes it less of a serious essay on the music industry and much broader-appealing tale of a romantic triangle, and the backstage All About Eve histrionics of the young princess usurping the queen’s throne. In this regard it works very effectively.

But it also means there are occasional soapie moments either as scenes or dialogue. If this had been an HBO or Showtime series it would probably have delved a little deeper.

That said, Nashville is a satisfying, well-performed drama with a very clear focus on its premise and its audience. That should see it enjoy success for some time.

Nashville premieres 8.30pm Wednesday January 22 on SoHo.

4 Responses

  1. @OzJay
    Ratings are often inversely proportional to quality e.g. Under The Dome.

    The Pilot was excellent, a nice melodrama with plenty going on. They put a lot of effort into the musical numbers which made the country music world they are creating believable. Much better than the mess that was Smash, a mixture brilliant scenes and numbers and the truly dreadful.

    The critics reported that it is all downhill from there. By the middle of S2 it is described as a cliche ridden soap opera with no plot or character development.

  2. As ever, ratings are no indication of quality. Nashville is infinitely superior to either Chicago PD or CSI. I’m not a huge lover of country music, but the music is well chosen and well integrated with the drama. In fact, Nashville has succeeded where the lamentable Smash failed. And Australia’s Clare Bowen is a stand-out in an excellent cast.

  4. It is rating 1.3/4 (18-49s) with 5m viewers at the moment in the US and getting beaten by CSI and Chicago PD in its timeslot.

    Normally ABC would axe a show with those numbers, but this season they have had 9 absolute turkeys that will have to be cancelled, so they may have to renew Nashville for S3 & 4.

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