“Thank God I’m a Country Series.” Interacting Environments and Networks in Nashville

Television production is a complex business, where multiple players share the risks of high-budget projects through a coordinated management of synergies, allowing single companies to become part of larger networks in order to create economic and cultural value from multiple points. When it comes to long-running projects like scripted series, the topology of these networks of synergies needs to be resilient and ergonomic to face setbacks, adapt to new needs, and evolve over time. On the basis of these considerations, this chapter uses the case of the US network series Nashville to explore the ways collaborative environments work, adapt, and evolve to keep a narrative ecosystem alive over a long period of time – ultimately benefitting the series and all of its stakeholders. Often defined as a musical country soap, Nashville is set in the city of the same name, in the state of Tennessee, and chronicles the professional and personal lives of several fictitious country music singers and songwriters. These basic premises imply that its ecosystem runs financially on a cross-industrial network of synergies that bring together three environments: the TV industry, the actual city of Nashville, and the country music industry/community. The interactions of these environments not only grant the Nashville ecosystem its resilience and ergonomics properties, but as it interacts with outer agencies like audiences, fandom, culture, and society, it ultimately shapes and steers the series’ narrative.