Why Connie Britton Left Nashville

Connie Britton has been an integral part of every TV show where she plays a series regular — such as Nikki Faber in "Spin City" or Tami Taylor in "Friday Night Lights" — and that couldn't be truer for ABC's long-running "Nashville." In the musical drama, she portrays the beloved Rayna James, Queen of Country, for five seasons from 2012 to 2017. In the end, as she told The Hollywood Reporter in a 2017 interview, it was her decision to leave the show behind. Although she didn't really go into detail about what her reasons for leaving were, one of the major factors was timing.

"What was really important to me was that it felt like the right time. There were a lot of different factors that played into it; it was a cumulative thing," she said in the interview. "For me, it felt like the timing was important and my number one priority was the show and making sure that it was done in the right way."

That meant honoring and staying true to the character in her goodbye as well as making sure that her departure naturally fit into the show's world and primary storylines. It was a tough choice to make, but the only plausible way to write her character out was to make her die. So, in Season 5's Episode 9, "If Tomorrow Never Comes," Rayna dies due to complications from the injuries she suffered in a car crash.

As co-showrunner Marshall Herskowitz said in the same 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the writing team exhausted every scenario plot-wise to not kill Connie Britton's character and find another way to have Rayna exit the world of "Nashville" — but nothing worked. Given how much she loved her family, there was no way Rayna could stay alive without being in contact with her husband, Deacon (Charles Esten), and two daughters, Maddie (Lennon Stella) and Daphne (Maisy Stella). In any case, that would've betrayed the core of the character; thus, the only plausible option left was to end her life.

However, since Season 5 was split in half with a three-month break, the creators wanted to make sure viewers weren't left hanging at the end of the first half of the season. They made the decision to have Rayna perish in Episode 9 in order to give fans time to process her death and say goodbye. As Herskowitz explained, "We worked out a structure that gave us the time, the number of episodes to have the death, have the immediate reaction to the death and then have this sense of at least the beginnings of what life will be like without Rayna."

That approach worked since the episode of Rayna's death and the two that followed it have become some of the highest-rated ones in the series' history. Like in other popular shows where a fan-favorite character has to leave in such a devastating way (as Dr. Mark Greene did in "ER"), having a carefully-built strategy can lead to a deeply emotional and satisfying outcome.