Country Music Competition ‘The Road’ Might Be an Omen of CBS’s Conservative Future

For the last few months, CBS has been using cryptic ads to promote The Road, a new Taylor Sheridan–created reality show 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 Osbourne, 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 countrifried 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, each 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 the original Yellowstone might be surprised to know that the show was actually 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.

Last month, Shelton told an interviewer what he thinks Sheridan is bringing to the table. “You know, this is all the stuff that happens in the flyover states that Hollywood has ignored for years,” he explained to Women’s World. “He’s tapping into it, and in a big way. And so, of course, we want him and his input on this show, because this is what’s happening in the bars in the flyover states every single night, every single weekend.”

The Road bears Sheridan’s trademark visual sense—an affinity for washed-out colors and sweeping drone shots—and his embrace of both gender parity and racial diversity, which somehow hasn’t put him in the crosshairs of his conservative viewers. Though The Road can be slow, its emotional register is established through the patient exploration of its contestant’s back stories, which—in classic reality competition fashion—are tinged with hardship. Cody Hibbard, an adoptee from South Korea who was raised on an Oklahoma cattle ranch, openly addresses the audience’s perception of him: “I can see what you must be thinking. ‘This boy don’t sound like he looks!’ I am of Asian descent, for the people who can’t see.” Britnee Kellogg, a single mother in Arizona, speaks about how her custody settlement has kept her from making the move to Nashville; the B-roll shows her dejectedly walking away from a small-town courthouse as she tells the story.

The first episode lingers on the story of Blake Bailey, an Oklahoma man who writes songs inspired by his Native American heritage. He takes the stage with a wry smile, wearing a flat-brimmed hat with a hawk feather tucked into its ribbon. Early in the episode, he’d explained that this was a gift from his late father. Bailey was the only performer in The Road’s premiere doing something genuinely new and interesting; perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise when he was also the first one eliminated. “It’s not a reflection of you as a performer,” Urban tells Bailey with a shrug as the episode ends. “Sometimes you just don’t connect with the audience.”