Oh my, that's a very strong comment. I'll consider this a serious warning and maybe I should spend my money on something else instead.
Now I'm curious to know: how could it all go so very, very wrong?
When NASHVILLE was good, it was very good. It was never quite as soapy as an 80s soap, but what I liked was that it was very much about the city of Nashville and the country music business in the same way DALLAS was about the city of Texas and the oil business -- even if it was a more glamorised/simplified version of that business than the reality. NASHVILLE/DALLAS was its own specific universe and that was good enough for me.
It maybe wasn't as dark as I would have chosen it to be, i.e., nobody ended up killing or prostituting themselves because they didn't succeed in the music biz, but I could accept that it wasn't that sort of a show. The characters were very likeable, and it was emotional the way ER was emotional -- almost every episode would make me do a little cry.
Still, I was always aware that NASHVILLE could easily lose its music-based focus and become just a show where Sad Things Happening To Nice People, with the music stuff just becoming a backdrop. And eventually that's what happened, and I realised I didn't care enough about the nice people and their endlessly on-off love stories to carry on paying for any more DVDs (even though someone assured me that Something Absolutely Unthinkable That Changes Everything would take place at the end of the next season).
Sidebar: I always thought the music in the show was really great, even if the way it was performed was a little too slick -- nobody ever fluffed a line or a note when they performed. No matter what traumatic thing was going on in their lives or even if the song they were singing had only been written that afternoon, the delivery was always word perfect (unless the plot specifically required a character to break down halfway through a performance). This didn't bother me -- I happily accepted it as part of the show's artifice -- until I began losing patience with the series in general, then I began to crave some sort of realism in that regard. I recently watched
Ricki and the Flash, a really great little movie about a small-town covers band starring Meryl Streep and Rick Springfield, which has exactly the kind of gutsy raw realism -- you really believe those people are performing that music live in front of you and that their emotions are impacting the songs and vice versa -- that NASHVILLE lacks.
