I have been looking forward to seeing the brand new Nashville Star ever since I heard NBC would be bringing country music to the forefront with a prime-time audience and larger budget for the show that previously aired on USA. From what everyone was hearing on the audience side was that the show was coming together great and they had their judges picked out and signed on Billy Ray Cyrus to host the show. I was happy with all of the judge picks other then Jewel as she was involved with the past seasons and whatever little personality she shows annoys me and many others. Even after all of that I thought we have a great show coming together and can’t wait to see who they will have artist wise and can’t wait to find a great new artist from the pack to cover, maybe even more than one.

What I have found is that now in the second week is that there is not only a real lack of talent but worst of all there is rarely a real country song sang. Starting off with NBC’s way of trying to get the young girl crowd in Justin Gaston who sings (if you can call it that) the Plain White T’s hit song “Hey There Delilah”. It was a terrible performance and was made even worse after John Rich made his remarks about Gaston and Jewel making out. I feel that John Rich’s various bitter remarks comes from the fact that he knows the show is crap as well. The rest of the night went pretty much the same with others in the cast singing pop songs with Coffey singing John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change”, Gabe Garcia singing CCR’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain”, and Third Town was going to perform Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” before changing it to the predictable Alabama hit “Mountain Music”.

The show is a sorry excuse for country music and it is another attempt to try to bring pop into country more and more. The show is produced like a game show. It is rushed and does not run smoothly at any point. People are not watching the show in large numbers as it was beaten this week by re-runs on the other major networks for that time slot and we will soon be seeing the show run exclusively on CMT instead of second runs as it is thrown into the graveyard of shows NBC has destroyed. The show will continue to drop in ratings for a numerous list of reasons and as much as they have played a majority of pop music, host Billy Ray Cyrus announced that next week Nashville Star will be doing pop music. I just don’t get this show.