Walker (Thursdays at 8:00pm on The CW)
What a mindfuck the past year has been. You don't need me to recap all the stresses we've globally experienced, but it hit me hard watching Walker, the CW's reboot of the nonsensical Chuck Norris vehicle Walker, Texas Ranger. After years of watching cops kill innocent Black people on camera, and with something of a reckoning finally happening in 2020; after watching cops allow violent insurgents into the Capitol on January 6 to literally shit on our government and try to assassinate our leaders; after Senator Ted Cruz of Texas attempted to throw out the votes of millions of people in an attempt to undermine our electoral and democratic processes; watching a show about police in Texas isn't high on my list of things I want to do. Sorry, not sorry.
It's not that I think all cop shows should be canceled and all police are murderers, but it's an awkward time to make a choice to sit down and watch a television series based on a property in which the celebrated, nearly-canonized leading man ignores rules and regulations to deliver "Texas justice," which basically means beating up whoever he needs to in order to get the result he expects, needs, or wants. Walker tries to wrestle with some of those issues by being politically correct (in one scene, the family patriarch is told it's "Mexican-American" when he calls a character "Mexican") and by adding exactly one actor of color (Lindsey Morgan, The 100), but it never feels earned or like it's enough to make up for the cultural and narrative shortcomings.
Now, I've only ever watched one episode of Walker, Texas Ranger, so I can't speak to how closely Walker hews to the Norris brand, but I can't imagine Chuck Norris spawning a million memes if this is what the original series was like. Replacing action and ass-kicking with family drama, Walker follows the title character (Supernatural's Jared Padalecki) as he reacclimates to his family, his job as a Texas Ranger, and his life as he returns from two years undercover, a job he took following his wife's murder. He has a bratty teenage daughter (Violet Brinson) who's understandably pissed off that her dad ran off after she also lost her mother; a younger son (Kale Culley) he struggles to connect with; a brother who's taken over as ADA (Keegan Allen, Pretty Little Liars); and parents (Mitch Pileggi & Molly Hagan) trying to hold the family together.
That's it! It's a cop show plus a family drama but the twist? It's in TEXAS! Not New York, not Los Angeles, not Chicago or Miami or any other city where you'd expect to see a police procedural. Nope, this is Austin, Texas. And just in case you forgot, everyone wears giant cowboy hats all the time, Walker and his partner eat lunch at a BBQ food truck, and scenes are set with twangy music playing over shots of Austin's downtown.
But that doesn't really even matter, because most of Walker is a slow (sometimes agonizingly so), steady, laidback drama about a dad trying to reconnect with his kids after a tragedy. It's an almost old-fashioned kind of WB show in that way; he just happens to also be a ranger. But even on that front, creator Anna Fricke (who, incidentally, did write episodes of those WB shows like Everwood and Dawson's Creek) and director Jessica Yu (Ratched, Hollywood) never really distinguish Walker from other primetime soaps about dead parents and rebellious teens. Picking up pieces of other shows from the trope bin and plunking them down in Texas doesn't make an interesting new show.
Of course, none of this is of consequence to the CW's audience. Like with Dynasty, I'm sure the target demographic doesn't even know Walker, Texas Ranger exists, let alone that it made its star into an icon. So Fricke has, in place of crafting a compelling series (perhaps one that fully grapples with its source material's problems), thrown a lot of CW-friendly storylines, characters, and actors into a blender to create another lackluster slice of primetime government cheese.
Comments
Post a Comment