Texas Ranch House: Is This Historical Reality?

Texas Ranch House’s time travelers head off to work.

(Christopher Ragazzo/Thirteen/WNET New York)

If, like me, you like reality more than reality shows, you may be pleasantly surprised by the PBS series Texas Ranch House, narrated by Randy Quaid (which begins airing tonight at 8 p.m.). The concept is simplicity itself: Transplant assorted yuppies and suburbanites into a remote Texas location with conditions circa 1867—or at least as close as you can get to that when you know in your heart of hearts that there’s a Holiday Inn replete with minibars, cable TV, and air-conditioning a couple of hours away.

Artificial as the concept might seem, it’s a clever one, and it grows on the viewer. There are moments, to be sure, when you may want to take a load of buckshot to some of the whining slackers, and there’s no sense in pretending at any point that they’re in the same kind of danger as late-nineteenth-century pioneers were. (Though in the country they’re in, falling off a horse and breaking your neck is no less a danger now than 139 years ago, and those rattlesnakes couldn’t have been any meaner looking then than today.) But the very real and sometimes irritating presence of 15 phony frontier people does cause us watching at home to consider that there might be no better way in the twenty-first century to get a taste of life in the Old West, unless we’re sure we ourselves could do better on 47,000 sun-baked acres in 110-degree heat with hundreds of stubborn and contentious longhorn cattle, pigs, goats, and horses running about.

By the second episode I certainly had no illusions that I could do better. I actually ended up identifying with and rooting for some of the participants, the way I hear people talking about the cast of Survivor. My own personal favorite is Johnny, a 22-year-old Englishman who complains about all the small stuff but who rises to the big challenges with that feisty English strength that makes you wonder how they ever lost India. “The buckskin is most uncomfortable,” he tells the camera with a smile. “I’d much prefer sneakers and jeans.” Wouldn’t we all?

In truth, there was no small stuff on a Texas ranch in 1867, not if you wanted to live in more comfort than, say, a homeless person in late-twentieth-century Manhattan—which in fact is what the ranch’s cook, Ignacio (or “Nacho,” as he is quickly dubbed), was in the 1970s. “1867 in Texas,” Nacho explains with a grin, “is similar to the time I was homeless in New York. You have to learn to wing it a lot.” It never occurred to me that I’d find it fascinating to watch people try to fit warped bed boards together without benefit of power tools, or solve the problem of attaching door handles without screws—they wing it with strips of shoe leather secured with shoe nails.

Purists and buffs may quibble with some of the decisions made by the suburban vaqueros. One of the girls decides, in defiance of Old West tradition, to don self-made leather chaps and leave the kitchen in favor of a ranch hand’s role. The men shut her out at first, but she prevails and preserves her individuality in the bargain by adding fringe to her chaps.

Before it’s over, the crew ends up going through more bitching, moaning, and backbiting than J.R. and the Ewing family during an entire season of Dallas. Yet in the end they triumph, sticking it out for the duration. Saddle-sore, rope-burned, and sun-blistered—and after sticking with them for eight episodes, you may feel you need a shower and a beer yourself—they last out a Texas summer, get the herd rounded up, and complete a grueling nine-day cattle drive that John Wayne and Montgomery Clift would have applauded.

Come to think of it, Wayne and Clift didn’t really drive those cattle to market, and these folks did. A tip of the Stetson to all of them.

—Allen Barra is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine.