Nashville Recap: Jagged Little Pills

It’s image-recovery time in Nashville. Powerful New York publicist Makena has made Juliette go to an event at the zoo for a Sean Butler’s fundraiser. Who is Sean Butler? Well, a nice, Tebow-esque NFL rookie who likes fuzzy animals and church. “You haven’t let me do anything fun for three weeks,” Juliette whines, before posing with Sean and some sort of large aforementioned fuzzy animal. She looks totally miserable, but Makena is right: the photo goes viral, drawing a whole bunch of new Twitter followers and softening up Juliette’s image. Who knew fur was thicker than nail polish? Anyway, now the powers-that-be want Juliette to go on a date with the football hunk.

She’s hesitant, but agrees. They meet at a nice café over in East Nashville, where Juliette wants to get to know Sean – specifically, she wants to know why he has been so terrible in his rookie year. He fires back: “you as much of a klepto as you seem?” Touché. This fiery side turns her on. “Let’s get out of here,” she coos. “We’re young, we’re hot, and I got a jet.” True. She decides that South Beach would be the appropriate playground, brings out her best sequin dress and they dance the night away.

But outside of the club, the twosome are confronted by some paparazzi, and Sean goes all Christian Bale on one of them, knocking him down. This is really bad news for the good-boy quarterback. So, in a weird fit of selflessness, Juliette pays the photog 25k to not release the pictures. Sean is so touched, he shows up at her pad and asks if they can hang out again – inside this time, though. “I’ll call you later about hanging in,’ he says. Ew! Gross innuendo.

Meanwhile, in the race for mayor, things are getting dirty. Lamar, wanting to delay Coleman from arriving at an event to sign a “Clean Campaign Pledge,” somehow has access to the police department; enough to have them pull Coleman over for not signaling on a turn (note: no one signals in Nashville, ever). Coleman’s confused. “You getting belligerent with me?” asks one cop, while the other digs up the pills that Coleman had confiscated from a sponsor meeting with Deacon the other day. Uh oh. Drug scandal.

Unsurprising, Coleman doesn’t show up at the Clean Campaign event, so Teddy looks like a star.

Of course the music must go on, and Rayna is in the studio. She’s struggling with the idea that, for her next record, she has to choose from the same list of boring producers. “What do you think of Liam McGuiness,” she asks Mr. Manager. He’s a rock star who just moved to Nashville a la Jack White, and even has a dog named June (after June Carter Cash). Manager is hesitant, but they show up at Liam’s house anyway. He’s not having it. “You’re moms and SUVs” he says, sending them back out into the night.

But Rayna is persistent. She shows up at his house again the next morning in her best rock-star leather jacket, dropping references to his live shows in Belfast (thanks Google!) that instantly win him over. Just like that. He invites her in. “Let’s talk for real,” he says, meaning brood and drink whiskey. “You can’t just throw your mandolin and pedal steel through distortion and call it rock,” he says. Well no, you’d call it Americana, but anyway. They get drunk together, because Rayna wants to “blow up the box.” Apparently they get wasted and recording brilliance ensues. Now Rayna just needs to convince the annoying label that Liam is the way to go.

In East Nashville, Avery is pumped because a fancy promoter – Reed Olson – is going to show up at his 5 Spot gig, which he does, and watches the weird, 90’s wail-band number go down. Reed’s looking for someone to open for the Lumineers, and doesn’t seem too impressed by Avery’s band. But someone’s impressed with Avery himself– a manager named Marilyn Rhodes, who wants to represent him and thinks he would be great in that opening spot (really? Has she heard the Lumineers?). Avery, being sneaky and conniving himself, smells something off with Marilyn, so he shows up at Deacon’s house with a casserole to ask questions. Apparently, “Marilyn only represents good looking guys under thirty. And she only signs them after a certain closeness has been achieved,” Deacon explains. What kind of closeness? The naughty kind. Avery should know better, but when he hears they lost the Lumineers gig to cutesy country Canadian Lindi Ortega, he decides to show up at Marilyn’s house.

Surprisingly, though, he resists the casting couch and nice looking glasses of red wine. But it’s too late. Scarlett’s gotten the rundown from Deacon, who told her that her boyfriend is looking to plug his guitar wires in inappropriate places. So she walks out on Avery – finally – who decides to deal with his sadness by sleeping with the manager after all. Whatever works, I guess.

But speaking of evil ambitions – Coleman and his wife are settling into bed, trying to digest the drug scandal. He already held a press conference telling the world that the pills belong to someone he sponsors, but he knows these types of events are hard to recover from. Remember the photographer snapping pictures of Peggy and Teddy last episode? Well, turns out this guy works for Coleman, and it sure looks like an affair to the councilman and his team (if they only knew the truth about the 2 million dollar financial swindling!). But does he want to leak it? He didn’t sign that Clean Campaign pledge, anyway.

“Sometimes you have to do a little wrong to do a greater good,” says Coleman’s wife. Maybe she’s right. And if you ask Avery, sometimes you have to do the manager, too. Ambition makes you look pretty ugly, guys.