Watching “Nashville” in Iowa

Lonely, depressed, and newly single, a writer finds refuge in the comment section

I’ve always found comfort in camp. I used to hurry home after school to watch the last few minutes of General Hospital with my mom before she switched the channel to Inside Edition. Melodrama was the base of my media food pyramid. It’s no mystery, then, how I later came to be a fan of the ABC musical drama Nashville. It’s not a very good show, but it was delightful country camp — a bedazzled rabbit hole that I dove into on Wednesday nights in 2012 as an escape from the melancholia that crept in every time I returned to my empty apartment. Lengthy elliptical sessions and trips to the grocery store killed only so much time in the evenings, so I turned to Nashville for refuge.

But after each episode ended, I’d look around and realize that I was still in Iowa, alone with my thoughts on a show that nobody else watched. It would have been easy, back then, to find a co-worker or a guy at a bar eager to engage in a spirited postmortem about the latest episode of Breaking Bad. But where was I going to find anyone willing to gush with me over Nashville’s dreamy male protagonist, Deacon Claybourne, or to contemplate whether my crush was indicative of some unearthed daddy issues? The show wasn’t exactly a hit with my particular educated…