I enjoyed Carrie Allen Tipton’s essay on ABC‘s show Nashville. I haven’t seen the show. I didn’t even know it existed. I don’t think I have watched an episode of television on one of the networks in the last two or three years. If you exclude 60 Minutes, it may be five or more years since I’ve watched a non-sports, non-political program on the networks. And I’m not going to watch Nashville. It sounds awful.
I’d much rather they depict Nashville as it is, than as it ought to be. Even worse, while I can tolerate a little music snobbery from the jazz scene, since part of playing jazz is being an expert on your instrument, and I can get with the low-rent purity of HBO’s Treme, I have a real problem seeing alternative country as some kind of pure and sacred exercise. In Nashville, it sells records or it don’t. It’s the Las Vegas of music. If you want purity, you’re better off in Memphis.
Nonetheless, it is interesting that the writers of the show have decided that evangelical Christianity really isn’t a big part of its characters’ lives. I don’t know if that is a sign that a new South is arising, but it appears that the writers would like to believe that it is possible. Nashville without tinsel and pop and God!!
God and Man at Yale!
