Nashville Review: You’re Gonna Change (Or I’m Gonna Leave)

I’m still on board with Nashville. Love it! I’m very happy it was picked up for a full season. I’m also completely unimpressed with the political story. It seems to me there could have been so many different angles to take Rayna’s family. I’m not the script writer, so I’m not going to try to throw any out there, but I just cringe when the scenes with Lamar and Tandy show up, and by proxy, that makes any scene with Teddy unbearable.

A “clean campaign” pledge brouhaha and Lamar and Tandy think it’s a good idea to sully it by arranging for a traffic stop for Coleman on his way to the event. That, my friends, is why I despise politics. Everything about it is dirty and nasty. The only thing that even slightly ties the political scenes to the more interesting Nashville happenings is the tie between Coleman and Deacon. When a routine traffic stop becomes a drug incident because of the drugs Deacon gave to Coleman, his sponsor.

I still didn’t care about the Mayoral race, but it made me feel for Coleman and the good man he truly is, trying to help Deacon. It also proved he’d be a better Mayor for Nashville and gave me one more reason to hope he goes against his own better judgement and uses the trash he received while not following the clean campaign trail so Rayna and Teddy ultimately split up.

Rayna was busy forging her own musical path without Deacon, her regular producer or any of her normal cohorts as she chose a rocker dude to produce her album. While I still don’t like the song she wrote, her decision to break away from what’s expected of her as an artist is refreshing. It seems like she has been doing what’s expected all her life, and being force fed is no longer on her menu. Something tells me she’s going to wander down her own little bad-girl path, learn to understand a bit what it’s like to be Deacon, or even Juliette, before she reaches the destination of success she’s meant to find. It should be a fun trip.

Scarlett stood by Avery just until he did the right thing, and then she gave up. It was rather ironic that he could have gone to the place she accused him of going to, but he didn’t. He chose her over his career. That surprised me, but he did it. After everything, it turned out she didn’t have the faith in him she pretended to, and pushed him to do the exact thing she tried so hard to keep him from doing in the first place. He showed up on a slutty manager’s doorstep for a snog.

Listening to Avery talk about how people didn’t like him, I realized it was low self esteem that drove him to be jealous of Scarlett and Gunnar, not just general asshattery. It just didn’t take long to tip him into the directly everyone thought he was headed in the long run. After first being skeptical of him, now I feel badly for prejudging and sad at where he’s ended up. I think he did love Scarlett and wanted to be a part of her family. Now he won’t be. He may end up famous, but most likely unhappy.

Finally, we had Juliette, doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. What a perfect person for her to meet up with, the Tim Tebow of television quarterbacks. No drugs, no drinking, doing charitable work instead of partying. The anti-Juliette. I hope she learns more from him in the long run than he does from her, because they were cute together. If they have something, it would allow for a truly professional relationship between Juliette and Deacon and let’s face it, they made beautiful music together.

I didn’t understand the “angry photo” everyone thought was Sean wasted. Has nobody ever been photographed walking along the street before? I can take 20 photos of myself with a timer and only one looks normal. The rest look like I’m in various states of mental illness. It was a proud moment for Juliette to take care of the situation for Sean, offering herself up like a lamb for slaughter. She better be careful, her heart is showing.