Nashville is the ultimate in soapy, indulgent escapism. Connie Britton plays Rayna Jaymes, country music's longtime golden girl who is currently struggling to reinvent her sagging career and manage her strained marriage to a square-jawed cipher while keeping her powerful, manipulative family at bay. In the other corner, pop tart/money-making machine Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere) tries to establish herself as a credible artist while living out a volatile post-adolescence that includes (but is not limited to) kleptomania, a quickie marriage, her mother's addiction, extortion, assorted PR disasters, and a whole lot of sequined mini-dresses. Not surprisingly, Rayna and Juliette immediately dislike each other, but the show has the discipline and class (that's right, discipline and class) to show the conflict as a methodical war of attrition as opposed to a series of catfights. It is also but one of the show's roughly 317,000 subplots.

Though the writing is remarkably fertile, the acting is what elevates the show from clandestine guilty pleasure to something I am willingly sharing here. Britton (formerly of TV's beloved Friday Night Lights and current host of the world's most coveted hair) gamely captures Rayna's coexistent warmth and egotism, but it is Juliette that gives Nashville its crazy, flashy heart. Panettiere takes on Juliette's many facets--charismatic performer, steely CEO, whiny Millennial, wily survivor, architect of her own destruction--with verve and eminently watchable chutzpah.