Billy Ray Cyrus' upcoming CMT comedy series employs the local filmmaking community for a show that is anything but Nashville

It's an icy Wednesday morning in January. Conditions are rough, and cars are moving at a glacial pace along I-65. There's a small white chapel on Old Springfield Pike in Goodlettsville that is Kinkade-esque in its quaintness — it's topped by a modest steeple, and snow-covered gravestones off to the left of the building are surrounded by a white fence.

This is Luton's United Methodist Church, but today, a sign over the entrance reads "First Light Church." The parking lot is full of vehicles and film-production equipment, and the building is abuzz with production assistants, gaffers, grips, extras, publicists and actors — actors you'd recognize, even if you can't quite place them. There's Lacey Chabert of Mean Girls and Party of Five. Lesley David Baker — best known as The Office's stoic grump Stanley Hudson — is being led by the hand toward a director's chair; he's wearing contacts that give him the appearance of being blind and severely impair the actor's vision. Kevin Farley, looking a striking amount like his late brother Chris, is seated nearby, trading one-liners with a castmate. Several busy-looking people wearing headphones are seated near a bank of video screens.

Soon, an impossibly thickly coiffed 54-year-old comes bounding into the room, all charisma and grins. Gone is the early-'90s mullet that helped make him famous, but the Eastern Kentucky drawl is unmistakable — it's Billy Ray Cyrus, and he is quite literally the star of the show.

The cast and crew are gathered at the church for one of the final days of production on Season 1 of Still the King, an upcoming CMT comedy series that stars Cyrus as "Burnin' " Vernon Brown, a washed-up country singer turned Elvis impersonator posing as a pastor in lieu of performing his court-ordered community service. Cyrus later describes the series to the Scene as a "modern-day farce set somewhere between Elvis and Jesus." He isn't kidding: The first episode features a dream sequence in which both Elvis Presley and Jesus Christ make appearances — the latter is played by Hootie himself, Darius Rucker.

Cyrus also describes Still the King as a labor of love, a homegrown project four years in the making that almost never found a home. The show's creators funded and shot the pilot themselves in and around Nashville in 2012, but they couldn't quite sell the thing. Interest was expressed here and there — Warner Bros. offered the show's makers a development deal, and for a time it was being considered for redevelopment as a four-camera network show. But that wasn't how Cyrus & Co. envisioned the program. They wanted a single-camera show that was both irreverent and accessible — a show that opens with Burnin' Vernon crashing a stolen bread truck into a church marquee.

So they kept at it, and eventually CMT brought Still the King on as one of its very first scripted comedies, keeping the creators' vision intact — bread truck and all.

"We were a little concerned because we thought we might still be stifled by a network like that," says Travis Nicholson, who — along with co-creating the series with Cyrus and show-runner Potsy Ponciroli — co-stars as Vernon's buddy and partner-in-crime Walt. "But they've been incredibly generous with letting us do what we want to do. It's a little bit of the Wild West out there. Everyone's kind of throwing their chips in for the first time."

Nicholson, whose father is songwriter Gary Nicholson, grew up in Nashville. Ponciroli and scads of others who work on Still the King are current Nashvillians. As Cyrus explains, there's a true filmmaking infrastructure here — one that made development and filming an organic process.

"We couldn't have made this show without Nashville," Cyrus tells the Scene, adding that he initially wanted to call the series Nash Vegas. "Without the talent of Nashville, the labor pool, the film industry, the actors, the day players. My goodness, the catering. Honestly, the entire Middle Tennessee film community wrapped their arms around this project and actually made it what it is. They gave it the strength and the backbone. We couldn't have done it anywhere else."

Nashvillians played a big part in front of the camera as well — local and locally affiliated performers including Jon Sewell, Jon Burr, Birdcloud's Jasmin Kaset and Makenzie Green, Seth Pomeroy and Chris Crofton have parts in the series.

"We cast as many of our friends as we could," says Nicholson. "Not because we were doing anybody any favors. We know these people because we've worked with them. We know that they are the best people, and we wrote this show with them in mind."

The series was also shot in a variety of familiar local spots — Springwater, Santa's Pub, M.L. Rose, Nashville Palace and more. And though there is of course an air of silliness permeating the show, Music City's character — and a greater sort of authentic Southernness — does indeed come through.

"I don't particularly like one-note caricatures of Southern people," says Joey Lauren Adams, who plays Debbie, a long-ago one-night-stand and the mother of Vernon's estranged 15-year-old daughter Charlotte (Madison Iseman). Adams, who most will recognize from her turns in Dazed and Confused, Big Daddy and a handful of Kevin Smith projects, is an Arkansas native. "They really, I feel, allowed us to bring these characters to life and not just always hit that Southern cliché. And have moments where there's some reality. The show is kinda out-there, which is great, but you have to have those moments where you believe these people exist."

Indeed, Still the King isn't high art. It's goofy sight gags and one-liners and double-takes. But it also isn't overly reductive yokel mockery or lowest-common-denominator pap. There are solid bits here, and perhaps most importantly, there are redeemable, three-dimensional characters. As three-dimensional as can be expected in a show starring the "Achy Breaky Heart" guy, anyway.

Cyrus freely admits that his true calling isn't as an actor. ("I'm not really an actor," are his exact words. "I'm a singer-songwriter.") But there's a true, tender goofiness to his performance, and that can in part be credited to advice given to Cyrus by, of all people, director David Lynch.

"He said to me, 'Hey man, you know, you could do this — you could be an actor,' " says Cyrus, who appeared in the famously eccentric auteur's 2001 avant-garde noir film Mulholland Drive. "I said, 'You really think so?' He said, 'Hell yeah, man. Just do what you're doing right now. Just take a moment and make it real.' "

After Mulholland Drive, Cyrus went on to star in Doc, a medical drama about a fish-out-of-water small-town doctor who takes a job in New York City. Doc ran for five seasons on Pax TV (Remember Pax? No? That's OK) and was light on star power. But Still the King is a different animal entirely. There's some very serious talent and skill at work in front of and behind the camera, though it remains to be seen if CMT's flagship comedy will find a firm fan base.

The first of 13 episodes in Still the King's first season debuts Sunday, June 12, and Cyrus of course hopes there will be a Season 2. Not just for himself, he says, but also for the local filmmaking community, which — with the recent cancellation of ABC's Nashville — he thinks could use a boost.

"I know there's a lot of great people who are counting on jobs in the film industry, and Still the King can be a big part of filling that void if Nashville does end up pulling up stakes," says Cyrus. "Nashville has talent. They've got the manpower, they've got the facilities. Nashville can be a film mecca. It is a film mecca. It can be anything it wants to be. It's all there. ... I feel a responsibility there. I know that people are counting on work. People need work, and we've got a vehicle that can do that."

Email arts@nashvillescene.com