Nashville…A good show that people are mistaking for a great show. The pilot was fine…f-i-n-e, not terrific like a lot of the hyperbolic praise suggests. The best thing in it is Hayden Panettiere, playing the up and coming country star that’s a little less wholesome than her red-state image suggests. [Think Carrie Underwood if she were interesting.] She infuses all her scenes with a sly cunning we’ve never seen from the star before. The problem with the show is that it thinks the star is Connie Britton’s Rayna James, a character that seems exhausted after one episode. Whereas Panettiere’s character still has a world we don’t know (who isn’t a little curious to see more about her meth-head mother?), we found out just about everything there was to Rayna’s marriage (husband’s tired of waiting on the sidelines), lineage (mother dead, daddy baaaad, or so we’re told more than we’re shown), and baggage (her great love is her band leader…who she can’t be with, but can’t quite let go of to do bigger and better things). Rayna’s supposed to be this heroine struggling against a good-ole-boy system that doesn’t know what to do with women over forty (i.e. ones they don’t fantasize about sleeping with) but she actually just comes off as selfish. Why can’t her husband be the mayor of Nashville? She doesn’t want him to. Why can’t her band leader go off and get paid double the salary to work for Panettiere? She doesn’t want him to. Why can’t Rayna’s entire tour go on while she opens for Panettiere? Well, guess what else she doesn’t want to do…Grade for Premiere: B
Chicago Fire…But as to where Nashville shows promise, I can’t say the same for this new NBC drama. Nothing of any real interest happened in the pilot episode, and that’s too bad because they were throwing everything they’ve got at us. [Fires, firemen deaths, firemen near deaths, a bridge rescue/car crash, paramedic dilemmas, the near death of a child, new firemen hazing, etc.] It seemed like they exhausted all the best possible drama of a firemen show in the first episode, and the episode STILL felt draggy and uninvolving. I didn’t realize how good a show Rescue Me was until I was about thirty minute into this thing. The cast is mostly talentless (its headed up by Lady Gaga’s boyfriend) except for a standout performance from Monica Raymund. She’s sexy, tough, subtly vulnerable and yearning, and I wish she had been given better material. Grade: C
Sons of Anarchy…And finally, we have an inconsistent show that’s been on the air five years, but is currently enjoying their best season (so far) as the show only gets deeper, more exciting, more tense, and, in the last episode, funnier. After a season of startling violence and actual stakes (the killing of a major character so close to the beginning of the season only ups the ante for the rest of it) instead of just pretending the crew is in jeopardy, the show took a slight break this last week with what was probably their funniest sequence to date. Alabama native Walton Goggins (Shane Vendrill from The Shield, Boyd Crowder from Justified) dropped by as Venus Van Damme, a Southern Belle transvestite hooker, and immediately launched the character into greatness in only ten minutes of screen time. Goggins is an amazing talent (his work on The Shield was criminally overlooked by The Emmys) and he fully commits to the role here as well, donning a prosthetic pair of breasts to actually look like a (barely) post-op tranny, and mimicking the walk, mannerisms, and attitude of a “woman” who insists on being treated like a lady. There was something deeply sick and hilarious about watching this character get dropped into the middle of a blackmail situation with a bunch of ultra-macho bikers, and being one of the few people to truly surprise them…same goes for the audience. Grade for the episode and season so far: A-