Isn't it strange to think that at this time last year, Nashville was approaching its Season 4 finale on ABC with a lot of speculation surrounding the drama's fate on that network? Fortunately, the show's biggest drama is entirely plot-related, and its current network CMT is clearly enthusiastic about successful Nashville has been, as evidenced by the channel already putting in an official renewal order for Season 6, even though Season 5 is only halfway done.
Nashville still has eleven more episodes to bring us in Season 5, which received a 22-episode order back when CMT stepped up to resurrect the music-driven drama. Unfortunately, Season 6 won't be quite as big as previous years, with only 16 episodes lined up for a premiere at some point in 2018. That's hardly a dealbreaker, though, since shorter TV seasons usually mean stronger storytelling. Plus, Nashville had to make some big cuts while making the transition from broadcast network to a cable channel almost entirely untested with scripted programming, so perhaps the decision to producer fewer episodes had financial motivations.
Regardless of how much more Nashville we're getting, the celebratory fact here is that we're getting more! And you can watch some very happy people reacting to this news in the Facebook Live video below,
Along with the Season 6 renewal news, Nashville also revealed we'll get to return to the show on June 1 to see how everyone is dealing with their post-Rayna existences. The midseason premiere will start up ten weeks after the events of the previous episode, and we'll see Deacon and Juliette and all the rest dealing with newer issues involving their families and the never-ending labyrinth that is the music industry. And we can expect to see new characters joining the fray, with actresses Rachel Bilson and Kaitlin Doubleday recently signing on.
While it was definitely shocking to see everything that happened with Connie Britton's character this season, it was far less surprising to hear about CMT giving Nashville another season. Sure, it's extremely early for a renewal like this, but the network has literally never aired a program as successful as Nashville has been. It's averaging over 2 million viewers when Live+Same Day tallies are accounted for, and the first half of this season has racked up around 23 million views on CMT and Nick at Nite.
Now that fans can watch upcoming episodes without the compounding worry that another batch of episodes may never arrive, get ready for Nashville's return for the remainder of Season 5, which will kick off on CMT starting on Thursday, June 1, at 9 p.m. ET. In the meantime, earlier seasons can be found on Hulu, and you can check out everything else heading to the small screen soon with our midseason premiere schedule and our summer TV guide.
