What luck. When the singer-songwriter wannabes approach their Nashville mecca, the Grand Ole Opry, the doors just happen to be open. Not only that, the microphone and stage lights happen to be on. No security guards stop them as they tiptoe onstage.
Mika, a genuine coal miner’s daughter from Kentucky, timidly tests her voice in the empty temple of country music. The camera relishes her emotional reaction as she inhabits the dream.
When you’re dealing in semi- scripted television, it’s amazing how things fall into place.
In “Nashville,” billed as a docu-soap yet developed through Fox’s drama department, half the fun is guessing how much string-pulling and check-writing the producers did offstage to make such “spontaneous” moments happen.
The stilted series, debuting tonight at 8 on KDVR-Channel 31, is annoying in its almost- practiced dialogue. Reality TV has never felt so unreal.
And yet, for those eager to follow a gaggle of country-music dreamers as their hopes are alternately inflated and dashed, this “Nashville” may do. Certainly it serves up camera-ready (i.e., young and sexy enough for Fox) specimens in a dating-with-guitars fest, loving, winning and losing while warbling about tight jeans.
Because it’s from the brain trust that gave us “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County,” it’s already been tagged “Nashville: The Real Davidson County.” Is it real or is it Memorex? How many “coincidental” cameos by Nashville notables are arranged beforehand?
“It’s a small town,” creator- producer Gary Auerbach told critics.
Seriously, people, if you’re going to ask questions like that, you have no business watching. Under the rules of this neo-reality genre, in the contest between truth and beauty, beauty wins every time.
His production doesn’t follow the participants 24/7 like other reality shows do, Auerbach said. “That’s why we call ourselves docu-soaps.”
“Nashville” also differs from the usual dating-competing series in that its contenders are not nobodys. Rachel Bradshaw is the daughter of NFL star Terry Bradshaw; Jamey Johnson has already had a song on the radio; Clint Moseley, who sells jets for his father’s company, is considered the most eligible bachelor in town.
Still, the heartache is real. Anyone who has imagined himself on a Greyhound bus to Music City, guitar in hand, is likely to relate.
Johnson commiserated, “I know guys that have been in town for seven or eight years, and they’re just now getting their first song cut.”
Songwriter and artist manager Monty Powell, who was involved in the early careers of Keith Urban, Diamond Rio and Rascal Flatts, appears in the series as guiding light for up-and-comer Chuck Wicks. Chuck is that rarity who, early in the series, seems to have it all. Powell consistently reminds anyone who will listen that stardom is a long shot.
“We have a saying in Nashville, ‘The bus is always coming.’ There’s always talent showing up in Nashville, people pursuing their dreams. … The percentages of people that show up with the qualities that can really make
it are so minute that it’s
unbelievable.”
For a nation that swoons at “American Idol” and devotes its summer to “America’s Got Talent,” the potential for “Nashville” to draw a crowd is real, at least until television’s fall season gets underway.
Perhaps the most instructive kernel imparted by “Nashville,” for those of us who don’t know Music Row, is the idea that Belmont University is essentially a holding position for kids who want to try their luck at the music business but who don’t dare tell their parents they’re dropping out to go to Nashville. Belmont, it seems, is the happy compromise, where you can remain sheltered by whoever is paying tuition and still pursue the dream.
If you can’t make it there, maybe you can get onto a docu-soap.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
