It's back. What's back? Nashville is back. Thanks to the show, our fair city has grown in national esteem and exposure, but even more importantly, it is thanks to the show I can legally claim my cable bill as a business expense. We've got Rayna. We've got Deacon. We've got Juliette. We've got Scarlett. We've got Others. There are three live music performances. There are special guests, even: Florida Georgia Line, a group named after a place that would be the taint if we count Florida as America's dong (and we do). So what fine frolics have the folks at ABC provided for us tonight?
Rayna
Rayna. The star of the show. How do we know? Because she is the first one we see tonight. She is looking through a closet of fancy stuff. She is looking at engagement rings from assorted men. She is looking at herself (her favorite thing). Tandy, a sister, tells Rayna that everyone in Rayna’s life will be impacted by Rayna’s decision, because Rayna is the sun ‘round which all other (implicitly lesser) lives orbit. Tandy tells her that no matter who she chooses, her life will be different. “We have all seen Sliding Doors, Tandy, thanks,” Rayna forgot to reply. Rayna phones up someone and says that she loves them, but we do not know who this is. Because…
TWELVE HOURS EARLIER (no please not an episode of near-history flashback this only works in comedy) Luke comes in to snuggle up with bedtime Rayna. One or the other of them pays for a subscription to The Tennesseean, because their new engagement is literal front-page news, with a giant photo of the country power couple taking up the entire page above the fold. That is a pretty accurate depiction of a Tennessean cover! “What we got is damn near perfect,” he says to Rayna, but I spy a studded leather bracelet on his wrist (did he rob Gunnar?) so I wouldn’t be too sure.
Tandy is in high dudgeon over the sex life of her sister, per the usual, because why have your own sex life or career or family when your sister has multiples of each? Glom on, Jan Bradys of the world. Glom on. She is mad about Deacon, specifically, as if Deacon isn’t the hotter of the two. It’s kind of like she doesn’t know that her own sister is a secret slut for drama in spite of a lifetime of evidence for it, and suggests she doesn’t tell Luke about Deacon’s literal counterproposal. Tandy, this is why you’re alone. Bad judgment over secrets and how much sexy people love drama.
Rayna goes to Luke’s horse factory. They are talking about their engagement and then she talks about Deacon’s proposal. She is oblique in regards to what she told Deacon, and Luke walks away to check on the horse assembly line. Rayna puts on her hardhat and goggles and joins Luke on the horse factory floor. Luke asks her how she feels, and she says she feels a lot of different things. Lusted over. Pretty. Kinda farty. She needs to figure out what is good and right. Luke says he will not pressure her to attend his charity event for closed-down horse factories in the Midwest and walks away to confer with his horse factory foreman. (“Can you tweak the ‘rugged earthiness’ factor of the horses up 2 percent? I got a woman to win over.”)
Rayna pulls out her assorted boxes of Deacon memories. There’s seriously like three separate boxes. She rifles through, puts on one of their old records — and then the show whips out its dick, smacks the viewer across the face and screams “Inception, bitches!” while it actually goes to a flashback-within-a-flashback. It’s Rayna and Deacon’s (and retconned Luke’s) rough-and-tumble sexy drunken ’90s times. Halter tops, flip phones, and sleeveless denim shirts on men abound.
She goes to Deacon’s house, and he is like “Don’t pick the same wrong choice” and I am like “Huh?” and he is like “I have changed multiple times in the past 20 years, sometimes for the better!” and she is like “But I too have changed.” She loved Deacon. Now she loves other guy. What about recovery and great times? Hm sounds like a blast. She says no. He entreats her to come to The Bluebird and sing with him, that way she will know for sure, it works for Disney princesses.
And CATCHUP. Rayna looks in the mirror and puts on Deacon’s ring. She probably should have returned that, it would be the classy thing to do. But Rayna is not classy. She joins Luke at his charity event and paparazzi are very “Yay Rayna!” and she does the red carpet and kisses him and answers paparazzi questions, because even though she loves Deacon, she loves being famous even more and doing famous people stuff like getting proposed to on stage and showing off seven carat diamonds on the red carpet.
Which means Deacon goes on stage to no Rayna. It’s live TV (for the second time this episode), and it’s freaking me out. “No smoke in mirrors. No Auto-Tune.” Deacon gonna Deacon, y’all. He sings his sad ballad and the show transitions into Rayna making a sadface. Sexy times to be continued.
Juliette
Juliette is scared, and mad, and hysterical, and running around looking for scissors. Glenn and, um, Assistant (?) try to calm her down to no avail. Assistant hands over scissors, a pretty smart thing to do to a woman who is clearly in the middle of some kind of attack. She slams herself shut in the bathroom and begins to cut away at her hair. “We have all seen Empire Records, Juliette, thanks,” I reply out loud to the television.
So what was going on twelve hours earlier to be a catalyst for that hot mess? Avery is a ball of drunken mope on his sofa. Juliette bursts in, sick and crying and sad, she cannot take not knowing where they stand. “Don’t you have some kind of movie audition to get ready for?” Avery says, which I thought was a bad attempt to insult her but was actually exposition! He tells her to go. She just stands there. He goes. It’s his house. Ha.
Glenn and, um, Assistant (?), knock on Avery’s door, which is for some reason the door to a high school classroom. They enter with the help of the landlord, which feels kind of illegal to me? I wouldn’t let Olivia Benson herself in unless she had a warrant. Juliette is crying on the sofa. “What are you doing here?” they ask. “Trespassing, I guess.” YOU STILL GOT IT, KID. Glenn gives her some real stage parent talk about cleaning herself up to nail the Patsy Cline audition and I am like “No don’t do it, you would have to dye your hair.
Juliette makes the audition, and sings “Crazy,” a song I actually know. She’s getting cry face but keeps it together until the very end, when she loses it. Looks amongst the producers are exchanged.
We are now CAUGHT UP to the opening’s timeline and see that Juliette is sad and ugly-crying but only chopped off like 3 inches of hair. Glenn is like “You may have lost Avery, but, you know, screw Avery,” and in fact, the producers loved her (looks amongst producers in film and television always indicate love) and they want her to do a screen test. “You are not going to throw away the opportunity of a lifetime just because you got dumped,” and these are WISE WORDS THAT ALL OF US SHOULD HEED.
Haha Juliette’s new hair looks great! The doctor they called over to calm her down informs her she is pregnant, which is pretty devastating because now he won’t give her Xanax. The anti-pharmacology tyranny of fetuses in this nation must come to a halt. Mamma needs her pillz. (Congrats 2 Panettiere.)
Scarlett
Scarlett, a ladybug suffocating to death in cupcake frosting but somehow happy about it, is also the world’s worst roommate. She pops into the living room to get her stuff back from Deacon, a blood relative. Stuff like the cup he was drinking from and the pen he was writing with. Very adult and not at all petty or needlessly weird. What was Deacon writing with that oh-so-beloved pen? A song called “My Broken Promises Broke Your Heart,” because Deacon is a paragon of subtlety. “Did you think about the fact Rayna is marrying Luke Wheeler?” she reminds him. She also recaps her own last season by reminding us that she went crazy and wants to leave. Drunk Avery enters to wacky comedy riffs. He wants to hitch a ride out of Shitville, too. GOOD I HOPE YOU ALL MOVE.
“Thanks for everything!” Scarlett tells Deacon, “But that shampoo is mine,” and she rips out his hair. She smiles fondly over the house she lived in for like three months, and pops into the car. Avery is slumped down in the front seat, and Gunnar is creeping in the backseat, like a creep. He begs her to stay, she says no. She tells him to exit, he says no. So she just drives off with him. We, the townsfolk of Nashville, slowly peek our heads outside. The floats we have been working on for years are pulled out of our garages, and an impromptu parade slowly forms behind the car as the trio leaves town. The jazz band we hired out of New Orleans and hid underneath the convention center emerges and starts to play. Fiddle players soon join in, and the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles parachutes down to the streets, and all three disparate musical styles join together in perfect unity for a rousing version of “Happy Days are Here Again.”
These clowns, in the comedy road trip America never asked for. Gunnar reminds us that Zoe exists, and Scarlett, in a car in the summer sans air conditioning with a drunk person and the neediest ex of all time, decides to take the scenic route: “Oxford, Mississippi by way of the Natchez Trace Parkway!” Then there is screaming and Avery and Gunnar SLAP FIGHT because hey, fun news, you are now the comic-relief clowns, and Scarlett pulls over and now her car is dead, but I wish they were the ones who were dead.
On the side of the road while waiting for a tow, Scarlett is relaxing under her pink paper umbrella, because of course she has a pink paper umbrella. Avery is now my favorite, because he is pulling on hot liquor from a paper bag. He drunkenly tells her about Juliette’s indiscretion with Jeff Fordham, and they talk about how everyone has problems. I just noticed that her hair is down and it’s past her navel, so I tune out of most of the rest of the conversation. She says in regards to being with Avery, though, that she “thought a better man would come along.” Cue Gunnar emerging from the woods, “I can’t be sure, but I may have gotten chiggers,” he says.
God, this sloppy wet nonsense. The idiot trio is at a service station, getting the alternator replaced. The mechanic — and I would bet a million fucking dollars that this character is credited as “Gomer” — tells Scarlett, “I seen your breakdown on the Internet, did you get any help?” and it’s like way to take the most Gummo-looking actor you could find and have him be a rural boor who just yokels it up at the pretty damaged heroine. Avery, who appears to be a genius now, has absconded to a nearby bar. Scarlett and Gunnar go after him while Gomer takes pictures of her with his iPhone — just because he is a rude backwoods hick doesn’t mean he can’t have nice things, I guess.
Gunnar calls Scarlett an “artist” and there's almost a bar fight, this thing is going to be over 2,500 words as it is, I promise you this scene doesn’t matter. And they turn around and go back "home," the end, parade's over guys, clear up the ticker tape. Our new friends from New Orleans make literal sad trombone sounds for us.
Will
It’s Shush-a-Thon 2014 down at The Bluebird thanks to a live taping from the average country music fan’s favorite station, National Public Radio. Will is there to perform live (on radio BUT REALLY on our televisions) and oh Layla is there too and she is looking pretty sad. “Will” (aka Chris Carmack) performs. And boy oh boy, here is the thing about live television — it looks super-live, and that’s kind of the point. Yahoo Answers! sums it up surprisingly well, but I am glad I saw the intro to the episode to know this was even happening, otherwise I would have thought the show somehow gained sentience and transformed into its final form as a true soap opera. It’s a very different format, and very hard to do well — for instance, acting looks way “actier” when done live. We’ve gone from “Layla looks sad” to “Layla” “looks” “sad.” You are smart and can discern the difference.
And this happened ... before, I guess? Maybe after. I am confused on the "12 hours ago" thing, but the important thing to know is that it is not at all important. Sad-faced Layla is sad while her sad gay husband Will brings her a cup of coffee I can only assume is the saddest coffee in the world. She will drink it down and there will be a frowny face at the bottom of the mug with the word “FAILURE” written below it. Probably instant, too. “Did you ever feel anything?” she asks. Yeah, ha, he felt gay. She wants to know if he can change, which is not a question anyone under the age of 40 would ask in 2014, but sure, why not. (Spoiler: He cannot.)
CATCHUP, Will walks out of The Bluebird and Layla confronts him in the alley, saying that she can’t pretend to be happy. Deacon is looking at them like, “I get that,” and it’s like, “You definitely do not, dude.” In the tour bus, Will suggests divorce on account of him being gay and not loving her. “OK,” she says. The producer of their still-filming reality show pops into the bus and they tell her they want off the show. She shows them the footage featuring Will saying he’s gay. She said she sold the show as newlyweds in country music and the network won’t want a show about a gay cowboy and his naive wife. ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? Literally 100 percent of reality television viewers would kill to watch a show like that, and a smart network would jump on it. Hahahaha. “If there is anything reality television hates it is drama and the sex secrets of marginally famous people,” says the worst network of all time, Jesus, I mean really.
Rayna's Deadweight
“Dad hates music!” cry Maddie and Daphne. Daphne is kicked out of the room after saying one line, about 10 seconds into the scene. Teddy takes a minute to rap with his teen about feelings. She wants her mom to marry Deacon, not Luke, and she knows that is a hot family bummer on account of Teddy hating Deacon so hard.
Remember her dead stepmom? Haha, neither does anyone else.
Maddie apologizes for hurting Teddy’s feelings. He tells her he doesn’t hate Deacon, because it is thanks to Deacon’s sperm that she is alive today. And he doesn’t hate music! In fact, get dressed because he is taking the kids out tonight. “It’s not some mayor thing, is it?” and I was like “Oh yeah, why is Teddy still mayor?” They go to The Bluebird and the kids thank Teddy. Who saw that coming? (All of us.)
Florida Georgia Line
Happy to be back.
