(We're Not) The Jet Set: George Jones and Tammy Wynette as Prestige TV

Reckoning with Showtime's George & Tammy miniseries

In the twilight days of their tumultuous marriage, George Jones and Tammy Wynette boasted in a hit single that “(We’re Not The) Jet Set,” taking pride that they're "the old Chevrolet set" and not the kind of person who would listen to Bach and Tchaikovsky. They wouldn't be the kind of person to watch George & Tammy, either. Showtime's recent limited series is targeted squarely at the Jet Set, a prestige project proud that it's a handsome, weighty affair. 

George & Tammy is toplined by Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain, serious actors who generally don't convey a sense of country. That's not the case with everybody in the cast. Walton Goggins, portraying Earl "Peanutt" Montgomery—a skilled songwriter and friend of Jones who soured on the singer after Jones nearly shot him—played the wily redneck Boyd Crowder in Justified and can currently be seen as an evangelical huckster "Baby" Billy Freeman in The Righteous Gemstones. With both roles, Goggins shows a facility with what could be seen as the basic vernacular of country music: he can play it corny, earnest, earthy, and vulgar. 

To its credit, George & Tammy eschews many of these country cliches, treating its subjects with a studied solemnity. Certainly, this is a reflection of the aesthetic of John Hillcoat, the director who helmed all six episodes of the series. Hillcoat built his reputation as Nick Cave's resident music video director, parlaying that into a theatrical career when he lensed the singer/songwriter's script for the Australian western The Proposition which, in turn, landed the director the gig of bringing Cormac McCarthy's The Road to the silver screen. That's a resume that suggests an aversion to humor which puts him somewhat at odds with the show's creator Abe Sylvia, whose big break was with Edie Falco's post-Sopranos series Nurse Jackie and recently wrote the satirical The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which brought Chastain a Best Actress Oscar. 

A slight tension between Hillcoat's sober execution and Sylvia's predilection for grand gestures can be felt throughout George & Tammy. The sumptuous period design is infused with a welcome grit, much of it derived from the nuanced performances of its two leads, plus Steve Zahn as George Richey, the songwriter who later entered into a manipulative marriage with Wynette. Zahn has the simplest role of the three in one regard: the public doesn't know how Richey looked or behaved, so he's working with a blank canvas. Shannon and Chastain don't have it that easy. George Jones and Tammy Wynette were two of the biggest stars of their time, the kind of celebrities whose fame threatens to eclipse their achievements. The two leads don't resort to mimicry or affectation, instead building characters that are recognizable on a gut level, even if the performances can be far afield from the public record. Chastain's Wynette is poised and often in control, at least until the drug addiction takes hold; it's an idealized version of Tammy. Shannon doesn't look a thing like Jones: at 6’3, he's a half-foot taller than George, and his eyes bug out, they don't settle in, so the nickname " Possum" never makes sense. That doesn't matter. Shannon looks haunted, torn apart by demons he can’t name which suits George Jones: it’s always been difficult to discern the precise nature of his inner torment. When Shannon's Jones descends into a drunken rage or dissociates and starts speaking in the voice of a duck, it's terrifying. It's not played as a joke, there's a real sense of danger. 

Shannon manages to soften these hard edges with his wounded renditions of many of Jones's signature hits. The decision to have the actors sing is probably the only workable way of dramatizing the George and Tammy story: miming would’ve been awkward and this allows Shannon and Chastain to act the emotions. They’re better apart: together, it’s clear they can’t harmonize but alone they can let the meaning of the song do the heavy lifting.

Music isn't the problem plaguing George & Tammy, though. It's cultural context. The show treats its subjects and their art with respect—there isn't a moment where the audience is invited to chuckle at the rednecks on screen—but the show has no good feel for either country music or celebrity culture. This comes into sharp focus in the show's waning moments, when each of its main characters has their accomplishments summarized. After the supporting roles are wrapped up, we're told "George and Tammy's duets charted 14 times. 3 went to number one. As a solo artist, George had more than 160 singles hit the hot 100. 10 went to number one…Just 10 shy of Tammy's 20."

Set aside the fact that the show confuses the Billboard Hot 100—the gold standard in pop charts—with its country charts. You can also set aside the fact that this phrasing also obfuscates their individual chart achievements.  Yes, Jones went to number one ten times on his own but Tammy's total of 20 includes four duets, including three with George that are omitted from his own personal list of ten. This summary doesn't quite indicate the popularity of either George or Tammy, as it doesn't convey how Jones had big hits long before and long after Wynette's run of chart-toppers during the 1960s and 1970s, nor does it illustrate how brightly Tammy burned during her prime. Such is the shifting nature of fame: it ebbs and flows, reaching its high water mark at unexpected times. When George and Tammy struck up their love affair, Wynette's star was rising while Jones was at a plateau. He routinely found his way into the upper reaches of the country charts but it could be argued that his late 1960s sides for Musicor weren't produced with the care a talent of his stature deserved. Wynette happened to find the right producer at the outset of her career, with Billy Sherrill shaping the sound and often the sensibility of her persona. Once Jones made the leap to Sherrill's Epic Records, he served a similar function for George, steering the singer towards songs that collectively created an image of a troubled man seeking the solace of one true love.

With Sherrill producing all of the records Jones and Wynette made individually and as a couple, he could construct a narrative that ran through singles and albums alike—a narrative of a great, doomed love torn apart by bad luck and demons. The pair returned to this storyline long after their divorce, reuniting fairly regularly until Wynette's death in 1998, releasing albums with such titles as Together Again and One. George & Tammy effectively is an extension of this pattern, recounting the couple's courtship and dissolution with a gravity the singers themselves often didn't muster. The filmmakers never take into consideration that his great romance may have been partially concocted as a way to keep audiences invested in the careers of Jones and Wynette. By seeking the cold hard truths underpinning the songs, they wind up overlooking the cheerful hokum that resides squarely in the spotlight. It's not just that there's not a hint of George's love of novelty tunes, it's that there's no consideration of how Tammy evolved into a figure who was famous for being famous, occupying an outsized space in the tabloids and daytime television in the years after the couple's divorce. All this song and dance, which is a crucial part of country music culture, is dismissed even though it's part of the reason their music endures: "(We're Not) The Jet Set" and "Her Name Is…" provide a welcome relief to the operatic tragedy of "The Grand Tour" and "The Door." 

That doesn't mean George & Tammy is above succumbing to the machinations of soap opera. In its last segment, it invents two set pieces that help its story at the expense of accuracy, depicting Tammy Wynette as being at the session where George Jones recorded "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and also suggesting the two had a fling on their final reunion tour in the 1990s. Perhaps it could be argued that the staging of "He Stopped Loving Her Today" helps put the work of Sherrill into perspective—he certainly did mine the personal lives of his singers for product—but that stolen evening between George and Tammy somewhere on the road in the '90s is as much of an invention as anything the producer created and a good deal less honest and artful. The truth is much more interesting than this fabrication: after a few years of torment, George Jones stopped pining for Tammy Wynette, eventually righting himself with the help of Nancy Sepulvado, who married the singer in 1983 and stayed with him until his death thirty years. In George & Tammy, Nancy is barely seen, hovering in the background as a controlling manager who keeps Jones on the straight and narrow—better than the controlling George Richey but on the same spectrum, which is a disservice to her. This is all in service of the idea that George Jones and Tammy Wynette were a love affair for the ages, a notion that remains alluring even if time has revealed that it's as much fiction as it is fact. The disarming thing about George & Tammy is that it carries itself as if it's a corrective to history instead of an extension of the soap opera. And that's where Hillcoat's stylized grit winds up as a detriment: it suggests George & Tammy is the unvarnished truth when it's every bit as romanticized as the songs created decades ago by George, Tammy, and Sherrill.