thoughts on the Nashville series premiere

I'm going to preface this review by explaining something: when I am watching TV, I am usually also doing something else, at least during the commercials. Example: there were two episodes of Modern Family on last night. When the first one started, I hadn't quite finished cleaning my bathroom yet, so I kept jumping up during commercials to do that. After I had finished, my apartment was clean, except that the two pumpkins that I bought on Monday were still sitting around unpainted, so I sat them on some old magazines, got out my painting supplies, and got to work, looking up when I could tell the characters were responding to something visual (Phil got dorky t-shirts made to wear while moving Haley into the dorms at college! Gloria was insisting on wearing her pre-pregnancy clothes LONG after appropriate and busting out of them all over the place! Claire accidentally cut off a chunk of Alex's friend Skyler's hair!). By the time I finished that, Nashville was starting, and I fully intended to give it my full attention; I love country music, I love Nashville, and I loved Connie Britton on Friday Night Lights, so I was really looking forward to it. But then I wanted to take pictures of my pumpkins and post them on Facebook, and of course then there were other things I wanted to check out on Facebook, and then I needed to clean up my paining supplies, and then I freaked out a little bit because I had managed to get paint on both my pants and my couch (even though I sat on the floor to paint the pumpkins), and so on, and so on, and so on.

Somewhere in the midst of this, I managed to catch the gist of the pilot episode of Nashville, a lot of which was given away in the previews, and in articles I'd read about it: Connie Britton plays Rayna James, a country singer who is beloved by fans and by the Nashville community, but who hasn't had a hit in some time, and whose current album is tanking. Ticket sales for her upcoming tour aren't good, either, and the record company says that they will lose a lot of money if they try to send her out on an arena tour with those types of sales. They propose a solution: she will "co-headline with" (which Rayna figures out pretty quickly means "open for") Juliette Barnes, an up-and-coming singer played by Hayden Panettiere. Juliette is kind of supposed to be like Taylor Swift, I think-- if Taylor Swift was THE PERSONIFICATION OF PURE EVIL, that is. No, really, Juliette will probably turn out to be okay-- she seems to have more talent than Rayna gives her credit for, and her bitchiness appears to primarily be caused by Mommy issues. But in this episode, at least, she turned me off by flirting with/fawning over every guy she met while being openly bitchy to Rayna for no apparent reason, other than that she is apparently the type of woman who has no use for other women because they see them as 1) competition and 2) unable to do anything for them, financially, emotionally, or otherwise. I HATE that.

Anyway, Rayna is given a few days to think about the offer. The record company clearly expects that she will accept it once she thinks it over and decides to swallow her pride, and quite frankly, I expected her to, too. I expected that the first season of the show would primarily follow Rayna and Juliette on tour, and that they would have a dynamic similar to Gwyneth Paltrow and Leighton Meester's in Country Strong-- competitive with and suspicious of each other at first, but then slowly growing to like each other, with Rayna serving as a mentor of sorts to Juliette.

I was wrong.

Oh, I can't say how Rayna and Juliette's relationship will develop over the course of the series. What I do know is that Rayna walks into that record company executive's office, outlines all of the things that she has done for the record company over the years, and then tells them to "kiss their offer as it's walking out the door." And-- impressed by this point, but still seeing Connie Britton in her Friday Night Lights role-- I shout, "You ROCK, Tami Taylor!" And then they cut to commercial, and I do what I tend to do, which is pick up my laptop and check Facebook.

Meanwhile, a subplot is developing where Rayna's father, who apparently is one of the richest, most powerful men in Nashville, is trying to find a mayoral candidate who he can "keep in his back pocket." And because he is evil as hell, he plays on the insecurities that Rayna's husband-- whose name I can't remember, and whose character was so nondescript that I can't even pick him out of the cast list on IMDB, even with the helpful pictures that web site provides-- feels about always being in Rayna's shadow and encourages him to do it. Rayna doesn't like this one bit, but her husband takes her father's bait and accuses her of being unsupportive and unwilling/unable to ever take the backseat in their relationship.

Then there is a scene that is so good I can barely even talk about it, and I'm not sure if I even caught everything that was going on in it-- it was just packed with SO MUCH. Rayna is arguing with her father, and over the course of this argument, we get hints that 1) maybe Rayna's father has played more of a role in her success than she wants to believe and 2) there is more tension than we realized between Rayna and her husband, and that he "stuck by her" through something-- maybe she cheated on him? Maybe with her attractive songwriter? And the whole thing culminates with Rayna shouting, "We canNOT be bought!" and storming out of the room.

I put down my laptop. I started paying attention. And I stopped calling her Tami Taylor.

I feel like this show is going to be FASCINATING, everyone. There seems to be so much interesting backstory between Rayna, her father, her husband, and the other people in her life, and Rayna seems like such a great character: strong and outspoken like Tami Taylor, but also rich, powerful, and probably not completely squeaky clean and morally upright. I'm not sure what to do with Juliette yet, and I dig that one ad for the show features Rayna basically stepping on her with her spike heel. All I know is, this show looks like a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to it.