‘Nashville’ Showrunners Dish on Upcoming Season Five Storyline

The time is ticking and the countdown is down to a mere 36 days before the hit television drama, Nashville, returns to the small screen and reveals its storyline fate.

Rather than leave the Nashies with their pent-up anxiety over what will happen next, the showrunners of the drama got down to the nitty-gritty in an interview with Entertainment Weekly recently. Exposing the change in storylines and the importance of character focus, Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick talked all things Nashville to let fans in on an inside look toward season five of the series.

Rewinding back to where the show left off, the cliffhanger regarding Juliette Barnes left a lot of viewers on the edge of their seat. Spoiler alert: Barnes is back and has a bigger storyline than ever since her massive return after the mysterious plane incident, according to Zwick and Herskovitz.

“She finds her life very different now from what it ever was before. That cliffhanger affects other people in the story — when something like that happens, it’s a big event for everybody. There are ripples that go out from this event that affect other people in the show. It’s a pretty great story,” said Herskovitz.

Taking Barnes and the other beloved characters on a journey for the season lying ahead, the showrunners wanted to hone in on the depth within each relationship and highlight the ever-changing notions that each individual is chasing after in the show.

“These people have a reservoir of emotion and connection with each other that goes very deep, and what we find is that these first few new episodes that we’ve done are very, very emotional,” explained Herskovitz. “It’s been there embedded in the episodes, you could see it, but it wasn’t allowed to come to fruition before and by allowing the show to have longer scenes where you can play out the emotions between people and where you have fewer stories per episode, you can go deeper in a story and really have something profound happen between two people.”

It was also previously reported that the cast of Nashville would be growing over season five, but Herskovitz and Zwick made it clear that the additions were to spread the music further and give a bit of a change to the original mix.

“It was very important to us to bring in more diversity of music and of human beings. We have two new cast members who we love who I think people will love, and we’re also excited about the idea of different kinds of music. There’s an opportunity to broaden the palette, and that’s been really exciting,” Herskovitz said.

Nashville returns to television on Thursday, January 5, on CMT.