MISCmedia for 3/15/00
You're (Not) Lookin' At Country

ONCE UPON A TIME in the '80s, when cable TV was just starting to grow and most of its customers still lived in rural areas, the Grand Ole Opry people started The Nashville Network.

It drew on the existing resources of the Opry radio show, the Opryland theme park, and the Opryland TV-studio facility (home of Hee Haw). Because few country acts had made music videos, the channel emphasized variety shows and other live-performance formats.

And it was good.

TNN's amassed an invaluable trove of performance and interview footage with every major country star active since 1983; its archives contain rare film and video of most every country star who'd died before the channel's debut.

TNN's been instrumental in "breaking" most of those "Young Country" stars, and solidified a new, mainstreamed audience for the genre as a whole.

Its influence was proven in the mid-'90s, when the Billboard record charts switched from a survey format to listing actual record sales. The young-country acts were suddenly revealed to be bigger sellers than most of the corporate-rock superstars.

TNN's Sunday-afternoon NASCAR coverage, meanwhile, had helped make the stock-car circuit into America's most prominent racing sport.

But in 1997, the Opry's original joint-venture partner in TNN, Westinghouse Broadcasting and Cable, assumed control of the channel, just as it was merging with CBS (which in turn is being absorbed by Viacom).

The new management saw TNN not for its loyal audiences or its programming heritage, but for the millions of cable homes it reached (almost every cable system in the country carries it).

Hours of original live-music shows were axed from the schedule, replaced by advertiser-friendly "lifestyle" shows and cheap reruns. At first, the rerun shows were chosen for their more-or-less "country" settings (The Waltons, The Dukes of Hazard, Dallas). But now the schedule includes Cagney & Lacy, that two-woman cop show set in New York City. (You should all now yell out like in the Pace picante sauce ad, "New York CITY?!?")

When new original shows did appear, they were either dorky action shows (of the type clogging the USA Network's schedule) or trash-sports concepts aimed at teenage boys: Extreme Championship Wrestling, RollerJam, Arena Football, and most recently Rockin' Bowl.

Last month, TNN dropped its last weekday music programming, a daytime hour of videos, so it could add reruns of TV's Bloopers and Practical Jokes. (Ahh, nothing like faked "funny outtakes" with the stars of since-forgotten 1985 sitcoms.)

The only "Nashville" left in TNN is a three-hour Saturday night block, anchored by a half-hour simulcast of the Opry radio show, and a Biography-like documentary series on Monday nights. Viewers who write or email to complain are referred to to another CBS-owned channel, the video-clip based Country Music Television (carried on far fewer cable systems).

TNN will probably survive without country music. Can country music survive without TNN?

Already, CBS's Infinity Radio Group, which owned both of Seattle's country stations, has switched one of them to an '80s-nostalgia format. We may have seen the peak of commercial "Young Country;" though the more critically beloved (and sometimes even younger) "alternative country" genre appears to still be going strong on its semi-underground level.

TOMORROW: No, I don't know everything.

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