Every character on the CMT series Nashville desperately misses Connie Britton’s Rayna Jaymes (top).
As viewers, we feel the same.
Nashville returns Thursday at 9 p.m. ET for the second half of its first CMT season, and it remains an open question how the show is going to fill that void.
CMT is pretty sure it can since it has renewed Nashville for a new 16-episode season in 2018.
For us viewers, though, the episodes after Rayna’s death felt like the show was scrambling to get back on its feet.
Nashville has always been an ensemble drama, which helps, but Rayna was always a kind of first among equals, and her shocking death has definitely rearranged all the furniture.
At this point, several of the show’s main plotlines continue to revolve around what Rayna left behind, for her record label and for her family and friends.
At the same time, the producers clearly have wisely begun setting up the post-Rayna world. F’rinstance, her daughter Maddie (Lennon Stella, left) is starting her own singing career and trying to work things out with a potentially serious boyfriend, Clayton (Joseph David-Jones).
The problem since Rayna died is that too much is feeling redundant, and without Rayna around we’re not sure where it’s all headed.
Deacon Claybourne (Charles Esten), the best male character on the show when he isn’t being bogged down in excruciatingly long periods of drinking and depression, has already run through a familiar cycle where he acts like a selfish jerk and then snaps out of it.
Scarlett (Clare Bowen) is hip-deep in what feels like her 200th “should we or shouldn’t we?” with Gunnar (Sam Palladio), this time compounded by the fact she’s pregnant, and she’s not sure who’s the baby Daddy. Hint but no spoiler: We learn more about that on Thursday.
Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere) is back in the business, working with Maddie, and she’s regained her old schizophrenia: kind-hearted and decent one day, an irritable diva the next
We also see on Thursday how Juliette’s fans and the music world react to the gospel album she recorded with the choir at the church of the woman who helped Juliette survive her accident.
Will Lexington (Chris Carmack, right) is still having boyfriend angst, and steady Avery (Jonathan Jackson) is trying to help the people around him hold the pieces together.
While Maddie seems fairly stable at the moment, her younger sister Daphne (Maisy Stella) is moving into another tween rebellion crisis, feeling unappreciated and generally out of sorts.
Handling the drama of young girls was never Deacon’s wheelhouse even when Rayna was around, so there’s lots of potential for him to get really impulsive and stupid.
It’s not that Nashville has suddenly become a soap. It was a soap all along – a big, unapologetic soap with music, in the same vein as Fox’s Empire.
It’s just that a prime-time soap, in particular, needs to be headed somewhere, if only vaguely, toward some sort of peace of mind for characters we’ve come to like.
What keeps soaps interesting is that they keep throwing obstacles in those pathways and we watch the characters overcome them. Or not.
Nashville still plays that card in its post-Rayna era. But she was the tentpole, the one around whom the others moved. It’s going to take a while to give the show a new center.