On the weekend, I was flicking through Netflix and thought – well push me into a bramble bush and call me Fernando, there was a Dolly Parton TV series I had no idea about just sitting there, waiting to be watched.
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It’s called Heartstrings, and no – it’s not a Dolly Parton doco, sadly. Instead, it’s a series of hour-long mini films, each based on the plot of a different Dolly song.
Now, Dolly Parton is known for her exquisite story-led bangers, so while I was disappointed I wasn’t going to deep dive her incredible life, I was still pretty keen – the fact a bunch of relatively big-name stars like Julianne Hough and Ginnifer Goodwin had signed on for the series also had been intrigued. These eps couldn’t be that shithouse if actual celebs are in them, right?
WRONG.
Heartstrings is horrendous. Think Days Of Our Lives levels of script combined with schmaltzy down-home-country moral based plots. And yet… I am completely addicted and racing home each night to watch the next instalment.
I’ve only gotten through two of the marathon-long episodes so far – Jolene and Sugar Hill. Let’s start with Jolene, because it’s arguably Dolly Parton’s most iconic tune and has the spicy storyline of a lifetime. Relationship problems! A sexy temptress! Possible cheating!!
Dolly introduces each episode by the way, from some tacky-yet-amazing theatre in Dollywood, her theme park (yes, in case you didn’t know, Dolly Parton has a THEME PARK in America and you bet your sweet bippy I want to go desperately) and sets the scene for us. For Jolene, she tells us about a “red-headed hussy” her husband was caught flirting with at their local bank.
She then tells us that you might think you know who Jolene is, but you don’t. Cue the beginning of the episode and we have Julianne Hough with fiery red hair and a boobs-galore leopard print top on flirting – you guessed it – in a bank. She gets fired, and then heads to her night job, bartending at Baby Blue’s, a honky-tonk in town. She also, because OF COURSE, sings with none other than Dolly, who plays Blue the owner.
Meanwhile we meet Emily, a suburban mum with a good-but-mildly-boring marriage and a teenage son. She and her husband decide to go to Baby Blue’s on a date night, but he can’t make it so she goes alone, meets Jolene, hears her sing and books her to teach her son guitar.
Think you can see where this is going? THINK AGAIN BABY!!!! This is what I looooove about this series – it leads you down a predictable path and then BAM! Changes the cliche on you. Not entirely – yes, spoiler alert, Emily ends up jealous of Jolene and her husband is involved. But there is so much more that happens, and while for the first half of the episode I was laughing at the shitty script and bad acting, by 30 minutes I was pausing the episode any time I had to go pee.
I won’t tell you the rest of the plot because you should hundo watch. Let’s move on to the other episode I watched – Sugar Hill.
Sugar Hill, Dolly tells us, is a song she wrote in 2002 about a couple who were ~destined to be together~. So in we go to the episode, where we meet an old guy and his wife as they’re saying bye to their adult kids. Someone’s died, but we don’t know who. Then the wife, who is FAR too excited about life, is like “honey you’re sad let’s go back to Sugar Hill on a 7 hour road trip”.
Off they go, and off WE go into a flashback – two little kids playing by a lake in Sugar Hill, while the VERY terrible song ‘Sugar Hill’ plays in the background. The kids are obviously going to fall in love as adults, and when we see them for flashback #2 they’re teens and DO fall in love.
The boy, Logan, has a deadbeat dad who sells moonshine, maybe? IDK anyway Harper, the girl, is college-bound. It was pretty clear before when they were kids but becomes more clear now that they are this old couple! We cop some more flashbacks but AGAIN – you think you know where shit is going in this episode and then it throws curveballs at you! There were two honest-to-god MAJOR twists I did not see coming.
I’ve got six more episodes to watch, which gives me life – so much more Heartstrings! One of them is even about, I shit you not, “a mysterious mountain woman” who maybe becomes a lawyer out of nowhere? Every episode is different actors, different characters, most of them even different periods in history. J.J Sneed for example seems to be set in the Wild West.
So yes, Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings is goddamn awful, but somehow – thanks to some genuinely intriguing plot twists and an infectious level of down-home-country wholesomeness that really suits the festive season. WATCH IT.
