Although Nashville has skirted around the issue for a few years, this season it has done a cannonball off the high dive right into its soap status. It might have pretended to be a drama about women trying to make it in the country music industry at first, and it still has moments that transcend how pedestrian this sounds, but it is a soap. A soooooaaaaap. This “winter finale” is chock-full of paternity mysteries, possible overdoses, infidelity, broken weddings, and even a threatening long-term illness. It’s six months of Days Of Our Lives crammed into an hour.
Not that this doesn’t make the show compelling, but compelling in a cartoony, over-the-top way. Let’s face it, this season was headed there right around the time Juliette attacked her own hair with scissors. Season three started out with Rayna making her choice between Luke and Deacon, while offering some valuable flashback moments, but come on, there was no actual choice. Because Rayna going straight to Deacon = no drama. Rayna and Deacon pining for each other while the cracks in the Rayna-Luke relationship grow ever wider = lotsa drama.
It’s no coincidence that Juliette and Avery have the best storyline going right now: Both these actors started out in soaps. Hayden Panettiere even knows from life-threatening illnesses, as her little Lizzie Spaulding had leukemia on Guiding Light. Jonathan Jackson, of course, was Lucky Spencer on General Hospital. So they can sell soapy storylines. Hell, they even embrace them. The show certainly has done an excellent job of incorporating Hayden Panettiere’s pregnancy (and it’s a relief not to have her hide behind couches and lamps). This season Juliette has completely sold her Patsy Cline performance, opened her heart to Avery, and in a scene that made me actually cackle last week, stalked him in a hilariously covered-up outfit and an old-person scooter. Avery and Juliette’s friendship could never work out, even though they started out as amazing friends: Now they love each other, and there’s no disguising it. If we didn’t get the big wedding this episode, I’m rather happy with the little one did see.
Anyone who has ever turned on a television before could have predicted that Rayna was going to throw Luke under the bus, and I liked Will Chase’s performance as he smashed some chairs afterwards and yelled, “Get off of my property!” Rayna and Luke haven’t been on the same page since she stole the show at the CMAs, and their parenting views never did match up. But throughout this episode—and in a continuation of last week, when TV cameras invaded her home for Christmas—Rayna wonders what has happened to her life, spouting to Tandy, “I don’t recognize my life anymore,” and “I just want to make sure it’s my life I’m living.”
Rayna wants to be successful and a superstar, otherwise why would she sell Deacon out for a Rolling Stone cover? But I don’t think Nashville gets enough credit for the drama it spends weeks weaving together: Rayna has to hit it big with her Highway 65 label because she’s sunk every dime she has in to it (and even a mortgage on her house, if I’m not mistaken). Although she’s been famous for a while, the paparazzi lifestyle was never for her, and she’s always been positioned as a great mother who puts her girls first. Seeing a glimpse of them turning into terrifying boarding-school babies who fly home in private jets was probably enough for her to run scurrying away from Luke’s ranch to her modest Nashville mansion. At the end, of course, she most likely is driving toward Deacon …
Who, in the show’s soapiest twist of all, now finds out he has cirrhosis of the liver and a white blood cell count indicating cancer: The classic soap tradition of keeping two star-crossed lovers apart, when everyone in the world knows that they are destined to be together. Deacon and Rayna have been through years of struggle at this point: Can’t we just see what things would be like for them as a functional couple, for longer than the few weeks we got in season one? Instead, undoubtedly, Deacon will turn Rayna away because he doesn’t want his sick self to be a burden, and then she will find out about his illness accidentally, and go to him and zzzzzz … sorry, I dozed off there for a second. Deacon pouting for a half-season over Rayna’s impending nuptials was a waste of Deacon, and I’m not looking forward to his continued surliness as he fights an illness and stays away from the one person who makes him happy.