Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain are country music power couple George Jones and Tammy Wynette in Showtime series George & Tammy – streaming on Neon. As Amelia Berry writes, this true-to-life story of love and heartbreak will have even the biggest country music dunce searching for the pair’s whole catalogue.
From the very first time a cowboy picked up a six-string and started singing, country music has had an affinity for the drama of the domestic. Where pop music has dancing and falling in love, country has cheating, drinking, and D-I-V-O-R-C-E. It’s not just in the music either, look a little beyond the rhinestones and spurs of any golden age country star and you’re likely to find a lengthy trail of bitter exes and empty bottles.
Two of country’s biggest stars, George “The Possum” Jones and Tammy Wynette have more than their fair share of both.
That storied relationship is at the heart of Showtime’s new miniseries, George & Tammy. Based on The Three of Us: Growing Up with Tammy and George by daughter Georgette Jones, George & Tammy stars Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water, Revolutionary Road) and Academy Award winner Jessica Chastain (The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Molly’s Game) in a dark and intimate portrait of the partnership between two beautiful, talented, and damaged people.
Even if you don’t know anything about country music, you definitely still know Tammy Wynette. She’s the voice (and the hair) behind era-defining mega-hit ‘Stand by Your Man’. Born Virginia Pugh, her early work through the mid-sixties and early seventies helped to pioneer the “countrypolitan” sound; all syrupy strings and angelic backing vocals.
George Jones doesn’t have anything with quite the crossover power (you might have heard ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’), but in the world of country and western, he’s an equally imposing figure with 160 charting singles and ten number ones (a little shy of Wynette’s 20). The music they made together holds an even higher place in the pantheon of hillbilly music.
Following the pair’s lives from their meeting in 1967, through to their final performance together in 1995, George & Tammy doesn’t try too hard to impose a clean narrative, instead focusing on a few pivotal scenes to create a more suggestive evocation of their relationship. Even skipping through the years, this is a story overflowing with some of the wildest happenings ever to grace a true-to-life biopic. Electro-shock therapy, high-speed chases, fake kidnapping, attempted murder, 90’s electronica sensation The KLF… all of that and so much more.
Put down in straight facts, it all sounds a little over-the-top, but the whole thing is kept grounded by brilliant performances from Shannon and Chastain. Both sink completely into their characters, managing to seem understated even amidst the blown-out 70’s hair and deep-friend Southern accents. Steve Zahn (Stuart Little, The White Lotus) also gives a gloriously seedy and pitiful turn as songwriter and session man George Richey.
Given the onerous task of singing all of Jones and Wynette’s most iconic songs, Shannon and Chastain impart a wonderful amount of character and tenderness into their renditions. Working with legendary producer T-Bone Burnett and Rachael Moore, Shannon told Vanity Fair “These songs, they’re pretty deep and they’ve got some dark corners in them, and we spent a lot of time with them. In addition to learning how to sing them, I think they also kind of taught us about who the people were and the story we were telling.”
The music on the whole is brilliant. Soundtracked by some all-time country bangers (“here’s your one chance fancy, don’t let me down!”), along with incidental music from David Mansfield (Transamerica, Heaven’s Gate), it’s all awash in mournful lap-steel and sulky tremolo guitar. Watching through the whole series, you’d be hard-pressed to come away from the final rendition of Hank Williams’ Lost Highway without a strong desire to listen through George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s whole darn catalogue.
Perhaps George & Tammy’s most effective trick though, is how palpably it recreates the grubby neon atmosphere of 1970’s Nashville. You can really feel director John Hillcoat’s (The Road) background as a music video director, and something of the gothic suburbia of Nick Cave/Siouxsie and the Banshees/Einstürzende Neubauten definitely seeps through into his vision of America’s South. Even in full daylight, the burnt 70’s colours seem half-lit, and through the shabby interiors of clubs and hotel rooms you can practically smell the brylcreem and feel the polyester sweat of the costumes.
George & Tammy hits on some pretty charged topics, from suicide, to alcohol and drug abuse, to domestic violence. But showrunner and writer Abe Sylvia (reuniting with Chastain after having written The Eyes of Tammy Faye) was determined to honour Georgette Jones in how they depicted Wynette. Talking to Forbes, Sylvia said “Georgette was clear that her mother’s life was not a tragedy. Tammy had 20 No. 1 hit songs. That’s not a tragic life. For all the sad things she endured, she broke barriers with her music. She soldiered through some trying things and came out the other side of it as an iconic artist.”
Likewise, in depicting George Jones, it was important to give him credit for overcoming his own struggles. Sylvia says, “there were a lot of people who claim credit for getting George clean, and there were people who had his back and picked him up and dusted him off a million times, but you can’t own another person’s sobriety. These things were very important to her, so we honoured them.”
But amongst all this deprivation and despair, George & Tammy is a love story at its heart. A love story between two people who can never quite get it together, between two people doomed by pain, regret, and dependence. One that’s awash in accusation and recrimination, and that leaves more than one broken home in its wake. But hey, that’s why people love country music isn’t it? That thread of love that makes the heartbreak all the more lonely?
If you love country music, then this show is a gift. If you don’t…well you will after George & Tammy.
