The Daily Beast: "Why Is No One Watching ABC’s Critically Acclaimed Drama Nashville?"

Nashville is one of the fall season’s few critical sensations. So why is no one watching? I explore the reasons why ABC’s country music drama isn’t a ratings success—yet.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Why Is No One Watching ABC’s Critically Acclaimed Drama Nashville?" in which I offer praise of ABC's Nashville, and ponder why more viewers aren't watching this fantastic drama.

The fall television season has been largely disappointing. Few new shows have captured the passion or imagination of viewers, and the war of comedies on the broadcast networks—with no less than three separate comedy blocks on Tuesday nights!—has turned out to be little more than a minor skirmish.

So it’s all the more disheartening that one of the few bright spots on the fall schedule, ABC’s Nashville—which was picked up for a full season earlier this week—seems to be suffering as much hardship as a heroine in a country song.

Despite overwhelming critical praise—a Metacritic score of 84, signifying “universal acclaim”—and glowing reviews, Nashville launched with an audience of 8.9 million viewers and a 2.8 rating among adults 18–49, numbers that dipped in subsequent weeks. (The Nov. 7 broadcast, however, showed an 11 percent uptick, which brought the show back to hovering around the 2.0 mark.)

The show, from Thelma & Louise writer Callie Khouri and starring Friday Night Lights’ Connie Britton and Heroes’ Hayden Panettiere, revolves around the often cutthroat musical and political scenes of Nashville, Tenn., centering on a troika of talented women during the ebb and flow of their country music careers. Britton’s Rayna James was the reigning queen of country, but she has discovered that consumers’ tastes have changed, and her stardom long ago stopped burning white-hot. Panettiere’s brash young upstart Juliette Barnes is the latest pop sensation, but she yearns for legitimacy and creative freedom. And then there’s Clare Bowen’s naive songwriter Scarlett O’Connor, who is plucked from obscurity when she duets one night with her fellow Bluebird Café waiter Gunnar Scott (Sam Palladio).

Under the watchful eye of Khoury and her writing staff, Nashville is more than just a Glee clone in cowboy boots. The show skillfully explores the cost of living in the public eye, the lengths one has to go to in order to hold onto precarious financial success, the often incestuous Gordian knot of relationships in the country music capital, and the bitter pang of love lost. One subplot has Panettiere’s Juliette dealing with her junkie mother, a meth addict who careens from caterwauling to begging for forgiveness. Indeed, while Britton as always impresses with a lithe naturalism, Panettiere’s performance is surprisingly one of many reasons to watch. She infuses Juliette with a rare sympathetic streak despite her awful behavior, whether she’s trying to steal Rayna’s bandleader (and ex-boyfriend) Deacon Claybourne (Charles Esten) or a bottle of nail polish from a pharmacy. Her caustic exterior and slutty ways belie a wounded soul in need of salvation.

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The Daily Beast: "Nashville: 5 Facts About Clare Bowen and Sam Palladio’s Stunning Duet"

Can’t get that song out of your head? Jace Lacob offers five facts about the stunning duet, a cover of The Civil Wars’ “If I Didn’t Know Better,” in ABC’s Nashville pilot.

At The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Nashville: 5 Facts About Clare Bowen and Sam Palladio’s Stunning Duet," in which I offer up five facts about the gorgeous duet in the pilot episode of ABC's Nashville last night.

If you watched Wednesday night’s premiere of Nashville—or caught the series opener on iTunes or elsewhere—you know that you don’t need to be a country-music fan in order to appreciate the soapy and seductive Callie Khouri–created drama, which revolves around the battle for dominance between a country-music veteran (Friday Night Lights’ Connie Britton) and a young upstart (Hayden Panettiere).

While the two musical adversaries all but threw daggers at each other in the series opener, Nashsville is not just about the Grand Ole Opry but a canny exploration of gender and age politics in the music industry as well as a mayoral race, romance, and workplace-related drama. It’s also, not surprisingly, also about music, which concerned me as I am far from being a country-music fan.

Britton and Panettiere, however, make the cold war between Rayna Jaymes and Juliette Barnes palpably hot, anchoring the show with their nuanced performances of a woman heading toward the end of her career and another happily stealing away the spotlight. But for all of their quips and sobbing jags, the true clincher in the pilot episode was the breathtaking song—performed by Clare Bowen and Sam Palladio—that came at the episode’s end, one that pointed toward the season’s overall narrative, one that links the ambitions and high-wattage dreams of Britton’s Rayna, Panettiere’s Juliette, and Bowen’s Scarlett.

If you’ve found the episode’s final minutes and that song to be absolutely spellbinding (truly one of the first unforgettable moments of the new season), here are five facts about the song from the end of Nashville’s pilot:

1. While Clare Bowen’s Scarlett O’Connor—a star-struck waitress at Nashville’s legendary Bluebird Café and the niece of Rayna’s bandleader, Deacon Claybourne (Charles Esten)—claims to have written the lyrics as a piece of poetry in her notebook, it is actually a cover of a song by The Civil Wars that Bowen and Palladio perform. The song in question: “If I Didn’t Know Better,” which appears on The Civil Wars’ 2009 live album, Live at Eddie’s Attic.

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The Daily Beast: "Fall TV 2012 Preview: 7 Shows to Watch, 7 Shows to Skip"

The fall television season is here! But which shows should you be watching and which should you skip? I'm glad you asked.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Fall TV 2012 Preview: 7 Shows to Watch, 7 Shows to Skip," in which I offer my take on the upcoming fall season, with seven shows you should be watching (from ABC's Nashville to PBS' Call the Midwife) and those you should be snubbing (Partners, The Neighbors).

The fall television season is once again upon us, and overall the results are pretty depressing: there’s a decided lack of originality to much of the broadcast networks’ new offerings, as if they were somehow injured by the lack of interest in last year’s riskier programs.

In fact, there is a whole lot of formulaic fare coming to your televisions, and a ton of new (mostly awful) comedies this year. But fret not: it’s not all doom and gloom, as there are at least a few promising new shows on the horizon, from the Connie Britton-led country music drama Nashville to the sweet charms of offbeat comedy Ben & Kate.

Once again, the broadcasters have opted to hold back many of the more interesting new shows until midseason, which means we’ll have to wait until January for the launch of Kevin Williamson’s serial killer thriller The Following against James Purefoy in a murderous game, and Bryan Fuller’s television adaptation of Hannibal, which finds a young FBI agent (Hugh Dancy) meeting the cannibalistic psychopath Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) for the first time. Which isn’t to say that midseason is entirely promising either: the winter will also find ABC offering us the truly terrible Dane Cook comedy (and I use that word loosely), Next Caller.

In the meantime, however, while we’re waiting for the rise of the serial killers on the broadcast nets, here’s a look at the best and worst of the new fall television season.

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The Daily Beast: "TV Preview: Snap Judgments of 2012-13’s New Shows"

Will the 2012-13 television season be a success or a snooze? Over at The Daily Beast, Maria Elena Fernandez and I offer our first impressions of 30-plus network pilots—from The Following and Nashville to The Neighbors and Zero Hour (and everything in between)—coming to TV next season.

Head over to The Daily Beast to read my latest feature, "TV Preview: Snap Judgments of 2012-13’s New Shows," in which we offer our dueling he said/she said perspectives on all of the available broadcast network pilots.

While some of you may have jetted off on summer vacations in the last few weeks, we’ve spent the first part of the summer wading through pilots for more than 30 new scripted shows that likely will be on the air next TV season. (Sometimes networks change their minds, and, if we’re honest, there are a few shows we’d love to see disappear altogether.)

It was a Herculean feat to make it through the pile of screeners this year—it was not overall the best pilot season—to offer our first takes on the dramas and comedies that are headed to the fall and midseason schedules of ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, and the CW.

Every year, the networks present their usual takes on the familiar doctor-lawyer-cop tropes, and this year is no exception. But there are also a few bright spots: a fading country music star (played by Friday Night Lights’ Connie Britton, y’all!), the crew of a nuclear sub gone rogue, a 1960s cattle rancher turned Vegas sheriff, a romantic comedy-obsessed ob-gyn, a serial killer inducting cult members via social networking, another modern-day Sherlock Holmes, and the beloved Carrie Bradshaw.

So what did we think? First, a few caveats: 1) The opinions below should be considered “first impressions” of the pilots that were made available by the broadcast networks and not reviews. 2) All pilots—from music and dialogue to casting, etc.—are subject to change, so what airs next season may, in fact, be drastically different than what was seen here. 3) We reserve the right to change our initial opinions upon seeing final review copies of these pilots—not to mention a few more episodes. 4) Not all of the midseason pilots were sent out by the networks; some, such as NBC’s Hannibal and Crossbones, to name two, haven’t even been shot yet; CBS again opted not to send out its midseason offerings; while Fox isn’t letting us see The Goodwin Games just yet.

ABC

666 Park Avenue (Sunday at 10 p.m.)

Logline: A young couple moves from the Midwest and takes up residence as the live-in managers of a luxury Manhattan apartment building, where not everything is as it seems.
Cast: Terry O’Quinn, Vanessa Williams, Dave Annabel, Rachael Taylor
He Said: Eh. While the showrunners have source material to pull from (it’s based on a novel by Gabriella Pierce), I wasn’t all that thrilled by where the show is going. O’Quinn makes a better villain when he at least seems—on the surface—to be a good guy, but his Gavin Doran is written so overtly devilish that it doesn’t charm or intrigue. He’s Fantasy Island’s Mr. Rourke but with a short temper and a fondness for contracts. The supernatural elements don’t really scare, but I will say this: it did make me nervous to step on an elevator for a day or so… but didn’t make me want to watch another episode.
She Said: I really enjoyed all the spooky fun of this. It’s genius casting to pair Terry O’Quinn and Vanessa Williams as the married owners of a very mysterious fancy schmancy Manhattan building. So far, O’Quinn isn’t doing anything we didn’t see John Locke (Lost) do and Williams has brought her fabulous diva out for the third time, but they have a delicious spark. David Annabel and Rachael Taylor are also very believable as an in-love couple that moves in and are hired to manage the building. I wouldn’t move in to The Drake, but I’d visit.
Verdict: Sublet.

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