Soap-opera animals act like vegetables
The show: Nashville, Season 6, Episode 2 The moment: Zucchinis
Scarlett (Clare Bowen) spies her ex, Gunnar (Sam Palladio), at the farmer’s market. She hides behind the zucchinis. She knocks over the zucchinis. They chat awkwardly.
He asks if she’s been playing. She tells him she’s “thinking about taking a break from it all, just for a minute.”
He protests: “It’s just, you’ve got the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard. I’d hate to think about you not singing.”
“It just started to feel like an obligation, like something I had to do to help people,” she says. “Then I realized it wasn’t just my music that helped people. It was me. The stuff that I decided to do . . . So I wanted to do something more direct. Get some dirt under my fingernails. It’s just where my heart’s at right now.”
I think he said he was happy for her, but I nodded off.
I thought this show was a sexy soap opera? The suds have dissipated, my friends, and we’re left watching grey water with bits of, well, zucchini floating in it.
The problem here is that, after six seasons, viewers get attached to certain characters and then those characters have to develop . . . nice sides. Nice is boring. Juliet (Hayden Panettiere) ruing her bad behaviour? ZZZZZZZ.
The solution: make the nice char- acters mean. Instead of helping people (yawn), Scarlett should use her voice to seduce people, to score drugs, to become a sex addict. Something!
Don’t just get your fingernails dirty, hon — get dirty all over.
Sure, sometimes a zucchini is just a zucchini. But where’s the fun in that? Nashville airs Thursdays on W. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Tuesday and Thursday.