Murder in Music City (Cal’s Kitchen, Dastoli Digital, Reel One Entertainment, Storyteller Studios, Studio TF1 America, Lifetime, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, the next Lifetime movie my husband Charles and I watched Sunday, February 22, a “premiere” from 8 to 10 p.m., was considerably better than Double Double Trouble. It was called Murder in Music City and takes place in Nashville, Tennessee, mostly at the grandiose estate of country-music superstar Abilene Tucker (Deena Dill). It starts in her guest house, where a hunky young man named Jimmy Stone (Ty Trumbo) is practicing a new country song called “Stephanie.” We get a lot of shots of his hunky, muscular back as he sings, only someone wallops him from behind with a red electric guitar, killing him. Abilene Tucker calls her daughter Caroline (Madison Crawford) in a panic because she’s understandably worried that she’ll be accused of killing Jimmy, who was on Abilene’s property as both her latest boy-toy and her collaborator on a set of new songs she’s hoping will revitalize her career. The police officers assigned to the case, Detectives Moreno (Clark Moore) and Fisher (Olivia Crosby) – a white man and a Black woman – immediately arrest Abilene and assume she killed Jimmy after a lovers’ quarrel. Murder in Music City was written by our old friends Ken Sanders (story) and J. Bryan Dick (script), and directed by Dave Thomas. Sanders and Dick give us an engagingly large suspect pool, including the murdered man’s brother, Kyle Schneider (Brigdon York), who shows up to collect Jimmy’s belongings, including the blue-covered journals in which he wrote all his songs. Others include Abilene Tucker herself; Barbara (Elizabeth Houston), Abilene’s personal assistant; Marcia (Sharonne Lanier), Abilene’s (Black) agent; Hank James (John Castle), Abilene’s second husband and former duet partner; and Devin Brown (David Turner), a former stalker of Abilene’s who once turned up in Caroline’s bed and was busted in California, sentenced to a mental institution, but escaped and turned up in Nashville and tried to assault Caroline again until Kyle rescued her.

There’s a grim scene in which Caroline delivers Hank’s alimony check (since she was making so much money than he when they broke up, he gets alimony), and then Caroline and Kyle, who’ve become lovers, sneak into his home looking for Jimmy’s journals. At one point Abilene admits to Caroline that she wasn’t that good a mother to her because she was too focused on her career – she was devastated when her first husband (Caroline’s father) died suddenly and she married Hank on the rebound. She offers to take a few months off and take Caroline on a trip to Europe, but just then Abilene is formally exonerated of Jimmy’s murder and she decides to strike while the iron is hot and do an elaborate concert at the old Ryman Auditorium where the Grand Ole Opry show launched way back when (the location isn’t specified in the script, but it’s easily recognizable in the aerial shot on screen) followed by a Vegas-style residency there. She reconnects with Hank James to be her duet partner, and the two do a song called “Hey Baby” that’s credited to Hank as composer, but somehow (since she’s never heard it or seen the sheet music) Caroline recognizes it as “Stephanie,” the song Jimmy was working on when he was killed. Stephanie (Isabelle Almoyan) turns up herself, and she’s a woman Jimmy and Kyle fought over way back when during their early days in Seattle before Jimmy moved to Nashville in search of country-music stardom. Stephanie had originally been Kyle’s fiancée until Jimmy seduced her away from him.

For a while I was expecting Kyle to turn out to be the murderer, if only on the general Lifetime principle that the sexiest man in the cast is usually the killer, but in the end it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Ken Sanders and J. Bryan Dick ripped off the central gimmick of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and made four people legally responsible for Jimmy’s death. Abilene was the one who actually killed him after a fight, not over his affections, but over songwriting royalties: Abilene insisted on owning the copyrights of all the songs she and Jimmy wrote together, or the ones he wrote solo for their project. Jimmy was making the rounds of the record companies to land a solo deal for himself once his collaboration with Abilene Tucker made his reputation, and in a fit of anger Abilene clubbed him with her guitar. Hank, Barbara, and Marcia came together to cover it up, and when Caroline puts all this together they threaten to blacken her reputation and call her a drug-addicted psycho if she tells the cops or anyone else. They also burn Jimmy’s journal so there’ll be no evidence that he wrote the songs on which Abilene and Hank are staking their comeback hopes. Caroline greets the Unfantastic Four in Abilene’s dressing room on the night of her concert and extracts confessions from all of them, which she records not only on her own phone (which Barbara discovers and erases) but a separate one which none of the baddies notice. Caroline gives the evidence to Detectives Moreno and Fisher, who grimly note that they had the right suspect all along but the wrong motive, and Abilene, Hank, Barbara, and Marcia are all arrested.

The final shot is of Abilene Tucker, country star to the last, writing a new song on a yellow legal pad while in the jail holding cell, while Caroline and Kyle pair up even though one doesn’t hold out much hope for the longevity of their relationship – not when the biggest thing they have in common is her mother killed his brother. Murder in Music City is actually an engaging thriller, and I especially liked the two songs Deena Dill sang as Abilene Tucker in the final concert sequence just before she got arrested. I’m not sure if Deena Dill sang the songs or had a voice double – her Wikipedia page says she grew up in Nashville and appeared in a number of country-music videos with such stars as Billy Ray Cyrus, Aaron Tippin, George Ducas, and Trace Adkins, but not whether she has a voice herself – but I’m inclined to believe it's her own voice, if only because I can’t imagine a Lifetime movie having a big enough budget to hire a “ghost” singer. And while the ending is far-fetched, it’s at least conclusive and doesn’t have the maddening loose ends of the finish of Double Double Trouble!