Hayden Panettiere

After a short hiatus so ABC could air the CMAs last Wednesday, Nashville returned last night with an episode that felt like treading water. It is quickly established that there has been a two-month time jump, a jarring decision being that the show had only been off the air a week. I’m not sure if this was a scheduling peculiarity – was ABC initially going to give the show a long hiatus through the holidays? Or maybe Hayden Panettiere’s real life pregnancy required Juliette to fast-forward almost an entire trimester in order to physically catch up. In any case, the time jump served to mellow conflicts that had been building through the first part of the season, dissipating tension rather than heightening it.

Nashville comes back for its third season with almost no noise. What, after a magnificent pilot two years ago, was once supposed to be a ratings savior for ABC has become an afterthought for the network, who barely publicized its premiere. They have buzzy new shows to talk about: (How to Get Away With Murder, Black-ish), and returning ratings hits to protect: (Scandal, uh… Scandal). And yet Nashville persists on network television representing a category that doesn’t even exist, the musical soap opera. Those two genres have never been more unfashionable. Musicals must cloak themselves in faux-edgy irony like Glee or die spectacular deaths (RIP Smash.) There are other soaps, especially on ABC, but they have to be structured like procedurals and contain a healthy dose of violence to appease the Criminal Minds crowd. Nashville, in all its goofy earnestness, is nothing if not itself.

The success of the Fox hit Glee proved the viability of musicals in television, opening the doors for several stories to be told in that format. One of those was ABC’s Nashville, which made its debut in Fall 2012, with the additional feature of writing its own songs. Focusing on three female country singers at …