Three Reasons to Watch $5 Cover, the New MTV Show Created by Hustle & Flow Director Craig Brewer, According to the Man Himself

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Next summer, if we are lucky, Memphis-based director Craig Brewer will start shooting Mother Trucker, a feature film based on a true story about a guy who breaks out of the pokey to see his sick mama, and winds up stealing not only a Wal-Mart tractor trailer but Crystal Gale’s frigging tour bus along the way.

For now, fans of Brewer’s Southern-fried storytelling can get lost in $5 Cover, a new multimedia show broadcast through MTV. The idea is to present Memphis’ music scene from a variety of perspectives—narrative storytelling, documentary footage and so forth, focusing on the town’s working-class musicians. “The thing about Memphis,” Brewer tells Paste, “is that it has a history, musically, of not having a lot—but doing a whole lot with it.”

MTV Shows

$5 Cover premiered May 1 with an episode (above) starring Amy LaVere, but don’t worry if you missed it—the show’s web presence is at least as important as its TV slot, and perhaps even more so, with full episodes, behind the scenes footage, photos and (of course) a blog.

The format is a little tricky. “We tailor-made this series to be a narrative series,” Brewer says. “We are making up situations. But they are with real musicians, playing themselves—and completely improving everything that we’re doing.”

Here are a few reasons to watch, based on our interview:

1) The show won’t waste your time

“Each episode is like 6 to 7 minutes long, and it all crescendos into an exciting and functional music moment,” Brewer says. “It’s not like there’s plot, and then suddenly everything stops and then credits roll and some band is on a stage or something like that. If you’ve seen my movies, it’s hard for me to separate the two. I really try to have one music moment happen, there’s some drama—it triggers another music moment.”

2) Brewer reps his city for real

$5 Cover was all shot on location in Memphis. “Not only all on location,” Brewer says, “but 100 percent Memphis cast and crew…It wasn’t like this rather corporate bullshit where its like ‘OK, we’re gonna do a show in Memphis,’ and then they come in and do like Hollywood’s version of that. The street cred really stopped with us. We knew who was in our city. We knew the kind of tone it needed to have. And so we did it.”

3) Memphis doesn’t need you, but it’s happy to have you

“In entertainment now, for awhile, there’s been this attitude that it’s like ‘I gotta get out of my town. I gotta make it to the big time. I gotta make it to LA or New York or something like that,’” Brewer says. “And I have, I guess, a different attitude or philosophy on that because I live in Memphis where people play music at night. They play gigs. But then they’re serving you coffee or beers, or cleaning your house the next day, and there’s not this shame attached to it. There’s not even a desire to be validated by the outside world. This is a city, it exists quite happily on its own terms—but there’s nothing wrong with inviting the world into our back yard instead of us trying to leave our back yard to go into the world.”