Nashville ended its fourth season but also its entire run on ABC earlier this week. While the show knew it was cancelled a few days before the finale, the final episode gave us a crazy cliffhanger ending that left fans wanting more. This happened, despite the fact that Nashville also had a separate, happier ending waiting in the wings. However, Lionsgate TV’s Kevin Beggs says there is a good reason the country music-oriented drama ended on the note it did. It’s because the production company is working extremely hard to keep Nashville on the air on another network next season. Here’s what Beggs had to say:
There's a little short-term pain but ultimately long-term gain because we intend and are quite focused and are in substantive and serious conversations with multiple buyers about continuing the show on another platform. If we didn't feel that was going to happen, we might have gone a different way.
Honestly, the fact that Kevin Beggs and the rest of the people at Lionsgate had enough hope in a pick-up coming through that Season 4 got a cliffhanger ending is a gamble, but it is also potentially great news for fans. If a streaming giant or a random cable channel has interest in at least one more season of Nashville, it may not be the end for the series, yet. Still, if a deal doesn’t go through—as recently happened with CBS’ Limitless, which was shopped around before it was ultimately dropped—Nashville will never get the satisfying ending that fans doubtless craved.
In the finale, Juliette was heading to meet up with the father of her child by plane. This reunion would have been an adorable one, as baby daddy Avery was waiting for Juliette at the airport like something straight out of an old romance movie. Unfortunately, Juliette never made it. Instead, air traffic controllers lost her plane and we were left never knowing whether it was a fluke or if the plane had gone down. It was a calculated move, as THR notes the drama had filmed an alternate ending seeing Juliette reach Cadence and Avery at the airport.
This explanation is a little better than the one creator Callie Khouri put out into the universe just after the finale, explaining that Nashville had "songs left to sing." Still, it’s been a few days since Nashville ended and no pick-up has been forthcoming. Nashville star Connie Britton even seemed perfectly alright with packing up her life in Nashville and heading back to Los Angeles. There’s still a chance that Nashville may move forward on another network, but there’s also a possibility we’ll be stuck with that cliffhanger forever. I guess we can always say the Nashville producers are ballsy.
For the full list of what got cancelled and what got renewed, check out our network rundown.
