The Surreal Evolution of Nashville in Pop Culture, From Altman to ABC

In the climax of Robert Altman's 1975 film Nashville (not sure you can "spoil" a film this old, but if you've still never seen it and don't want to know how it ends, don't read the rest of this paragraph), a country music diva is assassinated on the steps of the city’s most eccentric civic landmark, a scale replica of the Parthenon. A red swatch of blood staining his immaculate white suit, her stunned duet partner bellows: "This isn’t Dallas! This is Nashville!"

The new ABC series Nashville is a lot like Dallas, the nighttime soap that began its popular run in 1978, substituting country music for oil as the industry framework around which revolves steamy interlocking subplots of lust, envy and political intrigue. Still it shares more than a name with the Altman classic. While Dallas was filmed mostly on L.A. soundstages, ABC’s Nashville follows the movie’s example by shooting almost entirely on location in its early episodes. Incommensurate though they may be in terms of artistic aspiration (Altman's film is a self-consciously avant-garde political parable, and the ABC series a sudsy entertainment), each manages to illustrate the link between the physical city and popular music, then and now.