Heartstrings (2019)

REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER

Let it be known that I baled from CHERNOBYL after fifteen minutes of episode 1 because it opened with a cliché (man kills himself, we go back to find out why) and I baled from HIS DARK MATERIALS after twenty minutes of episode 1 because it opened with too much-captioned exposition (I stayed long enough to get my Ruth Wilson fix)...

But I did not bale from Dolly Parton’s HEARTSTRINGS series on Netflix. No, sir. I am with this through to the end. She is one of the great songwriters as far as I am concerned. Each of the eight dramas in HEARTSTRINGS is based on one of her songs. It opens with JOLENE. Of course it does. If I am disappointed looking ahead it’s that there appears to be no “adaptation” of her greatest song, Here You Come Again. 

JOLENE features Julianne Hough as the triple threat titular character wearing impossibly tight denim shorts. Dolly is on hand as host and cameo character to oversee the proceedings. The story revolves around a wife, worried that her husband will fall for Jolene, a country-singer bar-tending denim-shorts-wearing beauty. Their marriage is getting a bit tired. The wife knows Jolene could steal her man if she wanted to. Just like Dolly sings.

It plays out like a Hallmark movie with country music. The downside being that the songs have already charted out the story so there’s little by way of surprise. But it is still glorious and for Dolly fans, we got four other songs on top of Jolene in the first episode. Dolly has a huge gay following and many suspect her songs of having gay subtexts, but I suspect the stories will not explore this aspect. It’s there in Jolene. Both in the song and the opening episode... the real love on-screen was clearly between the wife and Jolene... they should have got together and run off at the end.