New TV Drama ‘East Nasty’ Will Chronicle the Other Side of Nashville’s Music Scene
A new drama series that is coming to television is set to chronicle the less commercial side of Nashville's country music scene. East Nasty will follow the lives of several aspiring performers and musicians living in East Nashville, a hipster section of Music City that is burgeoning with counterculture ideas and music.
According to a press release, East Nasty is currently in development at 20th Century Fox Television. The show is slated to run on the Disney-owned Freeform channel at some future point that has not yet been determined.
"The show follows two best friends — one a black, queer singer-songwriter, and one a seemingly tailor-made country musician from a deeply religious family — struggling alongside other musical misfits for a place at the table," the press release describes. "Though they don’t fit the face or sound of conservative country music, they will fight to lend their unique voices to a genre steeped in tradition and history."
Deadline reports that Jamie Rosengard, whose credits include Dare Me and Empire, is writing the show. Mixed-ish showrunner Karin Gist serves as executive producer alongside her producing partner Claire Brown, Rosengard, Ginger Sledge (Where’d You Go Bernadette) and artist manager and music industry veteran Paula Kay Hornick. Gist is under contract at 20th Century Fox Television, and Sledge and Hornick pitched the project to Freeform.
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No cast or premiere date have been announced for East Nasty.
East Nashville's music scene has been the focus of several other television and film projects, including an ill-fated reality TV series titled Crazy Hearts: Nashville, which aired for one season on A&E in 2014. A documentary titled East Nashville Tonight from 2013 follows the booze-and-drugs-fuelled misadventures of some of the most prominent Americana and singer-songwriter artists from East Nashville, led by Todd Snider and Elizabeth Cook.
Nashville has also been the subject of several other reality series, including the equally ill-fated Private Lives of Nashville Wives, which aired on TNT in 2014, and a 2007 show called Nashville that aired for only a few episodes before it was axed. That show featured early pre-fame appearances from Chuck Wicks and Jamey Johnson.
Music City has been perhaps best represented by another, more famous show also titled Nashville, a drama which ran from 2012 through 2017 on ABC and CMT. That show starred Connie Britton, Charles Esten, Hayden Panettiere and more and depicted the dramatic inner workings of the music business in Nashville, centered around the interpersonal relationships between a group of friends who are at different levels of the business.
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