Things You Should be Watching: Nashville

Either you know about Connie Britton's hair or you don't. If you do you're probably familiar, too, with her way around a soft southern accent, her insistence on playing female characters with depth and dimension, and her ability to bring even flat or soapy scripts to life; if you aren't, you will probably spend the first episode of Nashville being like but her hair, I don't, I can't, and then you'll come back around again and get to the important stuff. Connie Britton is reason enough to get me to watch almost anything. 

She's particularly radiant and well-cast in Nashville as country music star Rayna James, a woman coming to the end of a certain period in her career as bright young thing Juliette Barnes, played to perfection by Hayden Panetierre, is in her ascendancy. The two of them rattle around Nashville and the same set of gruff, scruffy, guitar playing men, eyeing one another uneasily, coming to truces and then pissing one another off again. It could be a classic catfight tale but Britton's insistence on playing Rayna with a certain level of security in herself– and in her musical chops as much as her sex appeal– makes it a compelling examination of generational friction instead. One of the show's best moments has Britton's on-screen daughters doing an “>Wrong Song, on the actual radio. See if you can get all the way through