Unpopular opinion: Nashville doesn't deserve to come back.

Discovering Nashville was a little like falling in love, for a certain kind of woman.

I was that kind of woman.

“You should watch it, you’ll really like it,” cajoled my match-maker colleagues, nudging me towards a show they knew was just my type.

And they were right. In those early days of obsession, I could barely sleep for watching. I couldn’t think about anything else. I sought out people who felt the same. I wrote about it. I made new friends around the world who shared my passion. I sang the songs, I quoted the lines, I stopped this short of joining a fan forum, for Christ’s sake.

Listen to Laura Brodnik’s theory about why Nashville is really over on The Binge. Post continues after audio…

What would Rayna Jaymes do? We would ask each other around the office, reveling in a grown-up TV heroine who had balls, smarts and hair you’d swap your firstborn for.

It was, in a word, tragic.

But hey. When you’ve got little kids and a busy job and you don’t get out much, you take your kicks where you can find them, right? And six months or so ago, I was finding my kicks in binge-watching a country-music soapy drama that sucked me in with its tangled plotlines of strong women, traitorous men, addiction, loss and many, many love triangles.

Hook, line and sinker.

So, when the call went up that the show was over, I should have been devastated. I should have been signing online petitions and Tweeting my outrage and writing angry emails to the network.

But I wasn’t. Because but the last season of Nashville was terrible.

Like the celluloid travesty that was Sex And The City 2, it betrayed all that was good and holy about what had come before. New characters were written in and out within episodes (hello, Vida, goodbye Riff), while others stayed way too long (Cash and your Dad, on your bikes) our brooding hero Deacon became a sad-sack rejected dad, specialising only in a facial expression reminiscent of a kicked dog. He and Rayna (oh, Rayna) lost their spark and ended up on opposite ends of a marriage counsellor’s couch. Maddie was unbearably bratty with seemingly zero motivation. Daphne only whined. Juliette was MIA and when she did show up, swung with such volatility between Wronged Woman and Earth Mother that it wasn’t just Avery who had whiplash. It took Will 25 episodes to grow some balls… I could go on.

Even the songs were bad.

And the finale cliff-hanger? Let’s not go there.

The cringe-y cliff hanger.  (Image via ABC. )

Look, we all know that when a TV show is so tantalisingly hooked on a premise of will-they-won't-they, it's incredibly difficult to maintain any electricity once that horse has bolted. When the stars had uncrossed for Deacon and Rayna after 25 years of booze-soaked longing, it was always going to be an uphill battle to keep us interested. But it wasn't just that.

Times are tough for a long-running show. In the age of bingeing, television obsessions hit fast and hard and leave just as swiftly. Just as you wonder what you ever saw in that old boyfriend who smelled faintly of bong water, now I can barely imagine why I was so invested in Rayna choosing Deacon over Luke Wheeler that I screamed at the television. I've moved on, people.

I've moved on to Narcos and Transparent and Game Of Thrones and Cleverman... and so have you.

Did the show-runners of Nashville know everyone was looking elsewhere and just started throwing any old nonsense up on the screen. Or maybe it was the dysfunction of a doomed show projecting through our TVs.

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Either way, Nashville rides again, y'all. It's reportedly been picked up by CMT and Season 5 is in the works.

There's no word yet on whether all the big names are coming back for the reboot. Clare Bowen told us she most certainly will. She lives in Nashville now. Didn't we all, for a while there?

But Hayden Panetierre is in rehab. And Connie Britton? Well, she and her glorious hair have yet to comment. But her farwell Tweets on the matter were pretty final when she said farewell and thanks for everything.

So, be careful what you wish for, TV tragics. You might want to hold on to the glory days of your show, but seriously, for Nashville, it looks like they've Already Gone.

See what I did there?

You can abuse Holly for her traitorous views on Nashy, here. 

We were lucky enough to have Nashville's Claire Bowen on a very special episode of The Binge. Listen to the full interview below. For more episodes of the show, subscribe in iTunes, find it on the Mamamia Podcast App, or via your podcast app of choice. 

See what I did there? Too soon?