For the last few months, CBS has been using cryptic ads to promote The Road, a new reality show co-created by Taylor Sheridan and hosted by Blake Shelton and Keith Urban. The ads featured tour buses, clouds of dust, scenes of Shelton and Urban flanked by other country stars like Lainey Wilson, the Brothers Osborne, Gretchen Wilson—and not much else. Since the series shares a name with Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 postapocalyptic classic, it was easy to imagine this might be some sort of countrified Squid Game. Instead, Sunday night’s premiere revealed the series as a contemporary answer to the American Idol–esque mid-aughts reality competition Nashville Star.
The Road gathers 12 country singer-songwriters, all of whom will open for Urban on a tour of small clubs. Amid product placement from sponsors Crown Royal and rodeo clothier Ariat, each contestant plays an original song, and the audience rates them using an iPhone app. One musician will be eliminated weekly until a single singer wins a slot at the Stagecoach Music Festival, a record deal, and a cool $250,000.
Contestants on Idol or The Voice aren’t necessarily professionals—but everyone competing on The Road is a working musician. The show’s tension comes from the sense that we’re watching a group of dreamers perform for a judgmental audience of both country fans and their idols. After spending 23 seasons as a coach on The Voice, Shelton knows how to look like he’s having a good time as he watches the contestants, even when he winces at a missed note. Urban, on the other hand, occasionally looks like he’s experiencing regret and despair—similar to how he’s acted recently when asked about his divorce from Nicole Kidman. On The Road, his impassive response to the performers renders him an enigmatic, even baffling figure. It’s not a surprise that Urban gets the task of sending the losing contestant home at the end of each episode.
Though Sheridan is new to the reality TV genre, he has a long history of putting real Nashville stars on screen, casting Tim McGraw and Faith Hill as the leads in 1883 and giving Lainey Wilson her first acting role as a singer on the rise. Over the last decade, the western drama Yellowstone established the writer, producer, and occasional actor as the Hollywood voice who could speak directly to “real America”—and he’s made CBS’s parent company Paramount plenty of money doing it. (He’s currently responsible for four other shows with high-profile stars on Paramount+: Billy Bob Thornton’s Landman, Kidman’s Special Ops: Lioness, Sylvester Stallone’s Tulsa King, and Jeremy Renner’s Mayor of Kingstown.)
The Road is an early sign that the Sheridan sensibility may soon be even more foundational to the Tiffany Network. After decades focused on winning over America’s middle-class middlebrow, CBS now seems to be making a bid for an explicitly conservative viewership, following the network’s acquisition by David Ellison’s Skydance Media. Then again, Sheridan doesn’t seem terribly interested in being a culture warrior; those who didn’t actually watch Yellowstone might be surprised to find out the show was something of a Trojan horse for progressive ideals, though they were never expressed in an overtly “woke” way. Ultimately, the Sheridan Cinematic Universe operates on the principle that you don’t necessarily have to cater to a paranoid, conservative audience so long as you omit anything that might offend them.
