The most unfortunate thing about the premiere is the continuation of last year’s Juliette (Hayden Panettiere) spiral, this time replacing baby shower tirades with glitterati mobs, fake posse members, and well-publicized all-night benders. The show started in a really solid place with her tenacity at climbing to the top, but it’s somewhat fumbled in providing her with meaningful drama once she reached it. While undeniably topical, this postpartum depression stint the writers have shoved her down is, well, kind of just that: depressing. There’s certainly room on a show built around country music for melancholy, but it still needs to work on an entertainment level, and that’s where Nashville is starting to lose the thread here.
Where the show has pretty much lost the thread since season 1, and I’m discouraged to report is still missing, is in the lone teen and pre-teen characters on the show. Rayna’s daughters Maddie (Lennon Stella) and Daphne (Maisy Stella) have provided the series with some of the best musical performances, even among the show’s myriad list of guest stars (like this season’s Steven Tyler get), and it’s doubly impressive the two are sisters in real life. They are not, however, in the least bit believable when they step out from behind the mic.
They perform what they’re given with gumption, but for whatever reason the writers saddle them with the absolutely most eye-roll inducing things to say, fights to scream, and actions to take, all amounting to some honestly cringe-worthy moments on the show. There’s just not a scene they’re in where they aren’t complaining about something, or having something good happen to them so that it can be ruined and they can complain about it later.
Maddie’s entire functionality is to hinder Rayna at every turn, and little Daphne does pretty much the same for Maddie. They serve no real purpose to the overall story, so even just trotting them out to sing every now and then with a brief update on which parent they currently hate would be more satisfying than feeling like room has to be made on a show where lack of characters is far from the biggest problem.
On the plus side, where Nashville continues to show surprising nuance – given the fact that this is the second season premiere in a row where a coma is a major dramatic plot point – is in the former hidden, and now public, sexuality of Will (Chris Carmack). It felt a bit forced when initially introduced, but even in the first episode alone there’s some justification to the nearing-two-years-old arc.
When Will’s boyfriend Kevin (Kyle Dean Massey) brings him to a brightly lit gay nightclub, he bolts. “I don’t belong in my old places, I don’t belong in there. I don’t belong.” Not exactly subtle, but it also feels like an aspect of the culture rarely explored on TV: not the angry, uninformed majority or the flamboyant, confident minority, but the normal guys stuck in the middle. There’s no guarantee the topic will be followed-up successfully, but for now at least there’s promise for what essentially boils down to the gay cowboy subplot on the country music show.
Overall, Nashville will give fans what they want out of the season 4 premiere, for better or worse. The show’s got some problems (a minor one of which: whoever runs wardrobe has not met a deep-V they didn’t love to see every male lead in), but they’re mostly easy to ignore, especially if you can let yourself get lost in the homey, southern pace of it all. That might be hard for some viewers, especially as we get more and more television that’s fueled by generating OMG-moments and twitter hashtags. Nashville isn’t nearly as entertaining or satisfying as (some) of those shows, but it’s also kind of refreshing and subversive in its own adamant claim to an overall earnest simplicity.
