by Megan Bailey, Staff Writer

Now that Smash has set the scene, enter Nashville, Callie Khouri’s television show following Nashville singers. Like Smash, it approaches soap-opera levels of drama, but with knock-out performances in each episode. The initial setup is that Rayna (Connie Britton) is a Reba McEntyre or Dolly Parton figure, but due to less-than-stellar album sales, she must join a young country/pop star’s tour. Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere) is a crossover starlet, not quite modeled after Taylor Swift, but you get the idea.

Rayna takes offense at this but, due to some behind-the-scenes shenanigans, including some blackmail from her own evil dad (remember that I said soap-opera drama) and her husband’s decision to run for mayor, she agrees. Yikes! There’s also the past relationship Rayna had with her longtime bandmate, Juliette’s struggles with mother, Scarlett’s (Clare Bowen) relationship with Avery (Jonathan Jackson, whose character ends up marrying Juliette) and later with Gunnar (Sam Palladio), and so on. It’s a whole lot of drama packed into six seasons!

Nashville’s music runs the gamut of actually incredible to good fun to headachingly bad. But what I like about it is that the songs come from a good number of writers. The music supervisor would either request songs from certain writers or would give a songwriter the idea for a scene and ask what they could come up with. An incredible song from the pilot—“If I Didn’t Know Better”—was written by The Civils Wars, who’d performed it live years prior. But then there’s the scene where Rayna’s daughters cover “Ho Hey” at a talent show… oof.

The show paid songwriters a one-and-done amount for the songs, and even with the songs going on streaming and compilation albums, there wasn’t much money in it beyond those initial payments. So, unlike when The Civil Wars’s song “Poison & Wine” played on Grey’s Anatomy and got them a lot of attention and radio play, they didn’t benefit nearly as much from their song being performed in the Nashville pilot.

And the music was popular! Over the course of the show, at least 20 compilation albums were released for streaming. A bunch of the actors also took part in some live performances, called Nashville On Tour—just like Glee Live before them. Three albums were produced from the various tours, called Nashville On the Record. A few of the cast members even performed a reunion concert at the Ryman Theater in Nashville in 2023.

Over the course of those seasons, the season one music supervisor (Callie Khouri’s husband) left, ABC dropped the show after the fourth season, Connie Britton left, CMT picked it up with new writers and showrunners, and that’s just the shenanigans in the show’s production!

Of course, television is a hard industry for anyone, but it’s not lost on me that Smash and Nashville were both showrun by women and that they faced incredible challenges throughout working on their shows. Theresa Rebeck, creator of Smash, went on to be accused of abusive work practices and left after the first season. By all accounts, she had never been in charge of a show before and was paranoid about the network’s interference. Khouri stayed with Nashville for four seasons but left prior to the show’s cancellation. Her husband described the tension between Khouri and the network as “a knockdown, bloody, drag-out fight, every episode.”

Hayden Panettiere has talked in recent years about how the show’s writers would take inspiration from her personal life in storylines for her character. When she was dealing with her addiction issues, that became part of Juliette’s storyline. When she got pregnant, so did her character. When she dealt with postpartum depression, Juliette did too. Having to act out her issues made it difficult for her to face them head-on in her own life after working on set all day. I’m sure this isn’t the first or last time an actor’s faced these issues, it feels very cruel to put someone through it.

Unlike Smash, Nashville got the chance to have a pretty good run, even on ABC. It took on many, many storylines and remained a good romp throughout most of the first four seasons. But the move to CMT left a considerable mark on the quality of the show, and I ended up dipping out somewhere in season 5. I did watch the series finale though, which served as a nice enough ending for the characters, though it didn’t make me want to pick up where I’d left off.

Nashville also set a good precedent for what’s possible for musical television with the right team and the right songwriters. Its success meant that there was proof of concept for modern shows like it in other types of music. Next month, we’ll talk about Empire, another juggernaut of the genre.