There’s a scene, in Nashville’s first season, when Rayna James, the show’s reigning queen of country music (played by the magnetic Connie Britton), strides onto the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in a form-fitting, golden dress, her perfectly curled hair framing her face. Pop-country starlet Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere) scowls at her older rival from the wings. Moments later, Rayna invites Juliette—who wears a slightly shorter, slightly more sequin-y dress—onstage, because their shared label is forcing them to sing together.

The two have been positioned as enemies, but after co-writing a song until the early hours of the morning, they’ve come to hold a begrudging respect for each other. The camera makes quick stops on the faces of the other musicians on stage, men whose lives are entangled with Rayna’s and with Juliette’s. The relationships are complicated, but there’s a simple reason they’re all performing, smiling for the audience on screen and the one beyond it: They’re there for the music.

Now, no one is: Nashville was cancelled on May 12 after four seasons. It’s not surprising — the show had been on a slow decline. But it’s still sad, given how good it once was.

That Opry exemplifies what Nashville used to do so well—it used country music to ground its characters’ relationships and further the plot. Yes, there was always melodrama, but for several seasons, the show was more than just a soap opera dressed up in cowboy boots, fringe, and a prime time spot. It was compelling television that walked a fine line between the ridiculous and the believable, and it used to be a pleasure to watch it teeter but not fall.

The legendary T Bone Burnett, who produced the first season’s songs, is no stranger to using music to tell a story: He oversaw the soundtracks for

O Brother, Where Art Thou, Walk The Line

, and

The Big Lebowski

. His expertise gave Nashville‘s music a legitimacy, that, for a country fan like me, made them worth listening to outside of the show. Some, like No One Will Ever Love You, a lilting ballad Rayna and Deacon sang with just the right among of twang, paid homage to the greats—Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Townes Van Zandt. Others, like Telescope, fell more in the vein of a Jason Aldean or Carrie Underwood song: country bangers that made me want to head to the nearest parking lot and set up a tailgate immediately.

The music anchored the show. It was to Nashville what the ad agency was to Mad Men, or the record labels are to Empire, or even the paper company was to The Office—something greater than the characters and their drama for whom viewers could root. My favorite moments often came with the performances that ended an episode, during which the camera would cut to various characters, wrapping up what had happened that week. Montages are usually boring fillers, ways to remind viewers of all the loose ends they’re supposed to be following. But these worked because the songs accessed nuanced emotion that the plot had trouble reaching. I’m not embarrassed to admit that they often made me cry.

What the show also had going for it were characters multi-dimensional enough to be somewhat believable, even in the face of the unbelievable things that happened to them. Juliette was always horrible to the people she loved the most, but in the beginning, the show let moments of tenderness peek through, giving her a humanity that made her fascinating. A storyline like her mother’s drug addiction gave her toughness and fierce independence legitimacy, because it became clear she’d always been the only person on whom she could rely. Her relationship with Deacon, one of the few friends she actually had, therefore made more sense as we got to know them both better: He was also broken, a man plagued by addiction and a horrible temper, but capable of compassion.

Most importantly, though, the show was fun. There were trashy storylines involving car crashes, pregnancies, adultery, prostitution, drugs, government corruption, murders, and revelations about who people’s real parents were. They were all wildly implausible, but the music and characters anchored them enough to make them feel like they were there for more than just shock value. The plots used to serve the characters, not the other way around.

I also can’t discount how much of a role Connie Britton played in keeping my attention. I’d watch her read the phonebook if that were the premise of a show. She’s not a great singer—sure, she can carry a tune, but her pipes are by no means the stuff of which country legends are made. But because of the steady moral compass and endless charm with which Britton played her, I was willing to suspend my disbelief.

Unfortunately, when Burnett left the show after the first season, it was the beginning of the end for the music. The decline in quality wasn’t immediately obvious in the second season—the song Don’t Put Dirt On My Grave Just Yet (a fitting meta-statement of the show itself, at the time) is one of my favorites that ever aired, and Burnett was long gone by then. But by the third season I was no longer listening to the songs on their own. And whereas the structure of the episodes once hinged on the strength of the melodies, and the plot wove itself around the character’s careers, the music became an afterthought by Season 4. “Oh right, this is supposed to be a show about the music industry,” I can imagine producers saying to each other. “Better toss a song in there somewhere.”

The characters started to became as flat as the songs did. While Juliette’s meanness worked before because she’d often surprise us by displaying a capacity for empathy, she became a one-dimensional monster in the first half of Season 4. Even though I had a hunch that they’d eventually give her some of her humanity back, I knew that it would be tired and boring when they finally did. The old relationships flagged: Scarlett and Gunnar’s longing looks, episode after episode, had me yelling, “Make out, already!” at the screen. Britton’s character started to seem exhausted, as though Britton herself was tired of carrying the show all alone.

And without characters I cared about, the plot—which had gotten more and more absurd—became nothing more than a series of events. It was basically Days of Our Lives with a music budget.

Midway through Season 4 (spoiler alert), one of the more minor characters tries to stop another character from drunkenly killing herself by jumping off a roof, and somehow manages to accidentally throw himself off it instead. I knew that this character, who’d been a terrible person, was going to die because the writers tied up his loose storylines and turned him into a nice guy at the last moment. The fall happened in slow motion, complete with jerky camera movements. And, of course, one of the other characters just happened to be looking out the window when it all went down, so I immediately knew that I had a “when will the truth come out?!” plot line heading my way. It was manipulative, cheap, and boring.

In order to be great, a television show has to keep its viewers curious. Perhaps, if Nashville had made me care more about the success of Rayna’s startup label, or made storylines about the artists’ careers feel as important as who was currently mad at whom, or who was dying where, or who was being accused of what, I would’ve stayed on board even as the quality of the music fell. But they didn’t. Towards the end, I no longer cared what was going to happen each week. And neither, apparently, did the network.

When T Bone Burnett left Nashville, he gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter about what it was like to work on it:

“Some people were making a drama about real musicians’ lives, and some were making a soap opera, so there was that confusion. It was a knockdown, bloody, drag-out fight, every episode.”

Well, T Bone, the battle is over, and the musicians lost. If the Grand Ole Opry scene in Season 1 showed just how good Nashville could be when it hit the right notes, the scene on the roof proved just how off-key the show became. It stopped trying to develop characters in favor of brainless cliff-hangers, and it lost the music, which was once the beating heart of the storylines. Without a brain or a heart, it’s no surprise that the show lost its soul.