Country music may be the most misunderstood of all genres. The mere mention of it can conjure up images of people in short shorts and plastic cowboy hats drinking booze out of a plastic cup while sitting on the tailgate of an old truck eating something on a stick.

That's the stereotype of country music that has been perpetuated by a slew of badly-written, misguided movies and television shows about country music and Music City, but it's nowhere near the reality. In real life, the people you see in pictures wandering around with big hair and plastic hats are visitors, and they just bought that hat at a tourist trap down on 2nd and Broadway. No self-respecting Nashvillian would ever dress that way, and certainly nobody who works in the real-life country music business.

Country music is the most personal of all genres, made by and for people who consider it an almost sacred endeavor. The people who work in the genre are passionate, talented and smart — not a bunch of dumb hicks who just came off a trailer park beer bender. And Nashville is a progressive, multi-cultural city that's lucky enough to be home to not only country, but also contemporary Christian music.

Music City boasts the largest collection of songwriting talent in one place not only in the world, but in the history of the world, as well as a recording scene that is the envy of every other genre. But you'd never know that from watching television shows or movies that purport to be about country music.

Click through the gallery above to see a number of not-so-fine examples of times when the movies and television got Nashville and country music completely and hopelessly wrong.

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