It was supposed to be the end of the road for ABC’s Nashville. The country-music soap opera had been canceled after four seasons, and though there were whispers of a potential pickup from another network or streaming service, a respectable, maybe even triumphant retreat into the sunset seemed like the likeliest end of the story for Rayna Jaymes, Juliette Barnes, and company.
Instead, the season (series?) finale ended with a hasty cliff-hanger, with Jonathan Jackson’s Avery left waiting on a tarmac to learn the fate of Juliette’s (Hayden Panettiere) missing plane. A cliff-hanger ending for a canceled series? Actually, in this era of nearly limitless platforms for television, it’s not just toying with audiences; it’s a smart business decision.
“There’s a little short-term pain but ultimately long-term gain,” promised Kevin Beggs in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. As the chairman of Lionsgate TV, which produces Nashville, Beggs is leading the effort to find the series a new home, and he says “[we] are in substantive and serious conversations with multiple buyers about continuing the show on another platform. If we didn’t feel that was going to happen, we might have gone a different way [with the finale].”
Word broke immediately after the finale aired that a happy ending—Avery and Juliette re-uniting at the airport—had been filmed but scrapped, “in hopes of making the show more attractive to platforms that might pick it up for a possible Season 5.” When ABC canceled Nashville in early May, the producers had a few short weeks to cobble together a potential series finale, and while Beggs describes the happy ending as “something we had in our hip pocket,” the cliff-hanger was always the plan. “I think it’s more of a disservice to try to hastily put something together that’s not satisfying. There will be detractors, but on the whole, the notion that this show will continue has been so positively received that I have to play the long game.”
Changes were already in store for Nashville Season 5—show-runner Dee Johnson was set to depart and be replaced by Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, the duo behind My So-Called Life and Thirtysomething. Intrigue in that change in direction, and maybe just plain old frustration at the cliff-hanger, seems to have Nashville fans still on the hook; the #BringBackNashville hashtag is still lively on Twitter, and Beggs says he’s still fielding calls from potential buyers.
For a network show to be canceled and find new life somewhere else used to be a pipe dream of fan campaigns and woebegone show-runners; now it’s a basic tenet of Peak TV, where there isn’t enough room for The Mindy Project or Friday Night Lights on a network but plenty of space on the ever expanding wilds of streaming and cable. But it’s still rare for an executive like Beggs to be so publicly confident about the possibility of renewal—and for a show to risk its entire legacy on a cliff-hanger, when a happy ending was already in the can. Fans don’t even need to campaign for their canceled shows to be saved these days; with all the money sloshing around television, someone with a checkbook is at least strongly considering doing it anyway.
