TV Characters

Texas Ten’s good friend Rob Sommerfelt is a long-time landman. We have to say, Rob–we never knew what you put up with. The stories are wild, and that is an understatement. But Billy Bob Thornton is pitch-perfect in his role, using every ounce of his trademark sardonic wit and demeanor to get through the landmines all around him.

What makes the show great, given its wild contrivances, is the message behind it. Every person associated with the energy industry knows this fact to be true: there is nothing more important, absolutely nothing, than getting the oil out of the ground. If you say “that’s crazy” while watching Landman, there are roughnecks, petroleum engineers, wildcatters, and company men across Texas who will immediately respond with “I’ll go you one better.” Tommy Norris just combines all those people into a one terrible, beautiful mess.

If Tommy Norris is Texas’s dark side, Chip & Joanna Gaines of Fixer Upper fame bring us the shiny version of the Lone Star. Although we live in Waco, we do not know the Gaineses. It is impossible to tell if Chip is as goofy-but-yet-competent as he appears on television, or if Joanna is actually that perfect suburban wife, mom, and designer that she seems to be. What we do know is that the Gaineses remade Waco’s reputation, and now draw scores of thousands of visitors to their Silo’s Market, 1928 Hotel, and other ventures. 

As with all design, cooking, and other reality shows that do not involve cutthroat competition, we are unsure why we watch. But watch we do, and so do millions of others. That is the power of a real star; the “it factor” every producer looks for. Chip and Joanna jump off the screen and grab your attention in a way that others do not. It is more than physical attractiveness, although Joanna is beautiful. She also has serious design chops, so the Fixer-Upper houses look great on television, but none is the Biltmore Estate.  

Instead, it all comes down to this. Chip and Joanna seem like really nice people. Given our world, that is a cool concept to build a television empire on.

Bob Phillips, the Texas Country Reporter, had to be on this list as the patron saint of Texas-centric reporting. For more than five decades, he regaled us with tales of the unusual, the out-of-the-way, and the legendary. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so we have the Daytripper, the Bucket List, and innumerable streaming efforts, including our own modest venture. 

As those of us with odometers that have turned over multiple times might have guessed, Bob patterned his efforts after Charles Kuralt. As a young television journalist in the Dallas market, Bob’s original idea was to produce local interest stories that could be aired on a variety of stations. His employer, KDFW Channel 4, saw the potential and gave him his own 30-minute show, 4 Country Reporter. After 14 years, Phillips struck out on his own, rebranding as Texas Country Reporter. In 2021, Phillips combined forces with Texas Monthly, and he finally retired from official road warrior duties in 2024. 

Bob is most often and most fairly described as a “storyteller.” We love his ability to inject drama and sentiment just shy of the point where it becomes sugar sweet. When you watch a Bob Phillips’ story about a Texas attraction, you walk into that attraction feeling like you know the people behind it. One-of-one is the only way to describe him.

We know these kids. We knew them when we were in high school; we knew them when they were our neighbors’ children; and we know them now that they are classmates of our grandchildren. Beavis and Butthead are eternal teenagers. The eternal part is a good thing because it is hard to fathom that they could make their own way in the world.

Mike Judge, the series creator, bears little resemblance to his creations. Trained as a physicist, he grew disenchanted with a career in science and turned to making animated shorts. One of those was “Frog Baseball,” which made its way onto MTV and introduced us to Beavis and Butthead. The rest is history, of a sort. The series has had three incarnations, initially airing from 1993 to 1997 on MTV before taking a hiatus, only to be resurrected for a season in 2011. In 2022, Paramount used a reboot to help launch its streaming service. The new version is on Comedy Central. 

The show recently has had episodes depicting Beavis and Butthead in middle age, as well as a “Smart Beavis and Butthead.” Regardless, the two teenagers from the fictional Highland, Texas, so clueless that they don’t know they are clueless, anchor the series.  Stupid teenagers are not a Texas thing, but being bold about who you are is definitely Texan. Thus, we celebrate the reverse excellence that is Beavis and Butthead.

I’ve known many excellent football coaches. None of them could hold a candle to Eric Taylor, head coach of the West Dillon Panthers and the East Dillon Lions, who led both teams to state championships. Of course, Friday Night Lights paints an idyllic picture of Texas High School football, where team beats talent, and adversity is usually overcome through old-fashioned hard work and grit. 

Kyle Chandler eats up the screen as Coach Taylor, becoming the coach we all wish we had. He has a beautiful, smart, stand-by-your-man wife and a daughter who duplicates her mom. The small-minded boosters, the hangers-on, the leaders of teen cliques, and other elements of Texas small-town life that revolve around the local team are all there, probably depicted with greater accuracy than the coach. 

It was an ideal setup for a weekly good vs. evil scenario. We had confidence that no matter what the scoreboard said, Coach Taylor would make sure that good would win. After all, that was his motto: “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”

Most of the characters on this list are who we wish we could be. Three versions of intrepid Texas Rangers, two brilliant, if conniving, larger-than-life oilmen, two amiable and telegenic television hosts, and the stalwart molder of men, a handsome ex-football hero. Beavis and Butthead are an aberration, but at least they are someone we are not. Truth be told, however, most of us are more like Hank Hill than anybody else on the list. King of the Hill and Hank Hill also come from Mike Judge’s creative genius, this time paired with Greg Daniels, who worked on The Simpsons, the American version of The Office, and co-created Parks and Recreation. 

Hank, his family, and his decidedly oddball friends exist in blue-collar Arlen, Texas, where Hank capably provides for the family by being an ace propane salesman.  Hank is hard-working, conservative, and kind. K ekows the world he wants to live in, one where morality is easily understood, the Cowboys win Super Bowls, and the beer is cold. Hank only gets one out of three, but his quiet dignity in the face of a world at odds with his worldview sets the series apart from most other contemporary animations, all marked by biting sarcasm.   

In other words, Hank Hill is the Texas version of the everyman, but considerably more content than Willy Loman.  There is a hopeful quality about Hank that is absent from most modern entertainment. One boot-clad foot in front of another, Hank makes his way through life. If Seinfeld was a show about nothing, King of the Hill is a show about the importance of small things.

King of the Hill enjoyed a smash 13-year run on Fox, before closing in 2009. This year’s revival has been a hit, as we catch up with a slightly more prosperous Hank, dealing with an even more confusing world. Hank’s moral compass is still intact, and we Texans can do far worse in picking someone to model ourselves after. We attribute Hank’s success to the one thing he can count on, an endless supply of cold Alamo Beer.

We could go on for days. As previous readers and watchers know, we are huge Larry McMurtry fans. It should come as no surprise that McMurtry’s seminal work, about his favorite subjects (Texas, Texans, and Texan cowmen), created one of the great mini-series of all time. Lonesome Dove tells the story of  Woodrow Call & Gus McRae, two ex-Texas Rangers turned cattlemen, on an epic cattle drive. Based loosely on the exploits of Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, this story is as Texan as Texan can be.

Call and Gus are different people, but they have a deep well of trust built over a lifetime of evading scrapes large and small. Their differences are those of style; the moral code is shared, ingrained, and immutable. At its core, that moral code means a man does what he can, or he dies trying. Also: no complaining except about each other.

Texans claim the Alamo as our origin story, as we should, but the Alamo heroes did not live to tell the story. The settlers who followed finished what Travis and his men started, taming a wild land against impossible odds. We have read great non-fiction books that tell the story well, but Call and Gus remain the archetypes. The only thing that keeps them from being number one on the list is that there were only four episodes.

Where does Chuck Norris end and Cordell Walker begin? No one knows, and no one cares. The two are fused as the perfect example of Texas manliness. Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.

As a quick review, Cordell’s backstory is an updated version of the original Lone Ranger. As a child, he witnessed his parents’ death at the hands of white supremacists, likely because they were mixed race, with Cordell’s father a Native American and his mother Caucasian. Raised by a Native American uncle, Walker joined the Marines, where his tour of duty in Japan served as an extended and fruitful martial arts training ground under the guidance of mentor Mr. Sakai.

He returns to become a kickboxing champ (In the beginning, there was nothing. Then Chuck Norris roundhouse kicked nothing and told it to get a job.) and Texas Ranger. He learns great police work from his partner C.D. Parker. Parker retires once Walker reaches “perfect peace officer status,” so that Walker can mentor his new partner, ex-Dallas Cowboy Jimmy Trivette.

We appreciate Hollywood’s earnest effort to showcase Texas multiculturalism. We love the fact that Cordell Walker would rather reason his way to a solution. It is awesome that violence is always Walker’s last resort. There are a ton of life lessons in a Walker, Texas Ranger episode that lead us to believe it is appropriate viewing for a five-year-old.

But let’s be honest. We love Cordell Walker because he will wipe the smile off the face of any crook with the heel of his high-flying shoe. (When Chuck Norris looked into the abyss, the abyss looked the other way.)

The only time in our adult lives Texas Ten lived outside of Texas was our three and a half years at Hahn A.B., Germany, from 1985 to 1988. The TV show Dallas was still among the top-ranked shows in the States (#11 in 1986-1987), but abroad, it was the king. When any German asked where I was from, the conversation pattern was set in stone, and its first subject was going to be J.R. Ewing. Guaranteed.

It is impossible to overstate the significance Dallas holds for the Texas image. In an age where “Greed [was] good,” J.R. Ewing gave Texas a weird primacy. We loved to hate him, but his wit and unabashed lack of any sort of ethical being made hating him impossible. Many modern television experts point to Tony Soprano as the first villain that we rooted for, but J.R. gets my vote. 

Texas can be seen as one giant confidence game. Nobody ever had more confidence than J.R. Ewing.  When he almost died, 83 million Americans tuned in to find out “Who Shot J.R.?” in one of the highest-rated TV episodes of all time. 

Larry Hagman played the arch villain to smarmy perfection. It almost ended before it began. J.R. began the series as a secondary character, but the producers immediately recognized that Hagman had created a monster they could use. As interest soared, Hagman wanted to share in the riches he was creating. As the nation waited to find out what happened, the parties played hardball. The producers devised a storyline where J.R. would undergo facial reconstruction surgery (after being shot in the stomach?) as leverage against Hagman. 

Cooler heads prevailed, and they reached a deal to pay the actor $100,000 an episode plus royalties on J.R. merchandise. Then a writer’s strike delayed the season. Eventually, however, the show got back on track with Hagman at its core. 

Whatever you thought of J.R., if you were of viewing age in the late 1970s through the next decade, chances are you watched J.R.; if you watched him, you remember him. In doing so, you shared the modern world’s vision of Texas, for better or worse.

The Texas Rangers (the law enforcement group, not the baseball team) are feared and revered in real life. They have a complicated history of heroics and brutality. Striking that balance correctly is for historians. In the public’s eye, they are heroes. That may have something to do with the fact that between 1949 and 1957, your ancestors watched The Lone Ranger like it was a church service.

Played mainly by Clayton Moore (he sat out a year in a contract dispute, but the public was not having his substitute, which likely improved Moore’s bargaining position), John Reid was the sole survivor of six Texas Rangers ambushed by outlaws. Reid would likely have died if not for help from Tonto, played by Jay Silverheels. Reid’s brother died in the ambush.

Tonto makes a mask from the brother’s vest, giving the Lone Ranger both a Nacho Libre feel (in retrospect) and a sense of mystery that any sane crook would cower from. The ranger finds a silver mine, so he has unlimited funds, ore for his supply of silver bullets, and a name for the horse he soon rescues.  From there forward, it is just righteous retribution across the Wild West.

The Lone Ranger meant several things. Most importantly, good always triumphs over evil. As a corollary, “good” can include Native Americans on the side of right and justice. While in TV terms, it was a bit of a mismatched partner motif, the show’s popularity did good job in undoing decades of entertainment depictions of “savages.” There have been movies, remakes of the series, remakes of the movies, and so on. None of them will touch the popularity and importance of the 1950s Lone Ranger as a force for good over evil.