‘Music City’ Highlights Nashville in New CMT Docuseries

CMT’s new docuseries Music City premiered on Thursday, March 1, and the slickly produced show is aiming to be the next big thing in pop culture.

Music City follows cast members Kerry, Rachyl, Jessica, Jackson, and Alisa as they pursue various dreams in Nashville. Rachyl, who is married to Kerry, serves as the narrator of the show.

Rachyl is an aspiring law student and Kerry is an aspiring singer. The two moved to Nashville from Los Angeles four years ago with their young son, which is dramatic storyline number one as Rachyl reconciles her own dreams with her husband’s.

Jessica is also an aspiring singer, while Jackson, a personal trainer, is caught in a love triangle with Jessica and another woman. Alisa is also an aspiring singer who is eager to pursue her dreams.

Music City is produced by Adam DiVello, who was also responsible for MTV’s reality juggernaut The Hills.

“I think if Laguna Beach was kind of like a reality Beverly Hills 90210, and The Hills always felt like kind of a Melrose Place-type show … that [Nashville] was the next show to copy — not copy, but the next show to emulate,” DiVello told Yahoo Entertainment.

Throughout the show, cast members perform their own music as well as covers of popular songs like Ed Sheeran’s “Castle on the Hill.”

DiVello explained, “I’ve always been a big fan of music, and we’ve always used music in our shows to help us tell stories, with the lack of confessionals that we don’t have in our [other] series or this series, so we depend a lot on music.”

While Music City is billed as a reality show, DiVello acknowledges that cast members’ lives are filmed and edited to create maximum drama. As The Hills fans know, things aren’t always what they seem.

“Everything that you see on screen is really happening. I mean, it’s really what’s going on in their lives,” DiVello said. “Obviously, we’re going to shoot it, and we’re going to tell it in a very dramatic way, and I think we always explain it to the cast, but we’re like, ‘We’re going to take just your normal, everyday life, and it’s going to look very dramatic when you see it in a few months on TV,’ and that’s what we’re here to do. We want to tell a story.”

Photo Credit: CMT