One year after CENTRAL PARK WEST was canceled, CBS wisely decided to patch things up with its core audience of older viewers. "Cutting-edge" was out, "traditional" was in. CBS would be a place viewers could "come home to"; they would be safe in the knowledge that uplifting, old-fashioned family entertainment would be waiting there for them.
With "Walker, Texas Ranger," CBS could be overdoing this thing just a bit. With all due respect to its millions of fans, WTR is one of the corniest and most predictable shows in prime-time history. With plot lines that were old when George Burns was young, music that seems to be a lethal fusion of the BATMAN and MANNIX scores, acting that makes William Shatner look like Marlon Brando, and dialogue that could stop THE DUKES OF HAZZARD dead in its tracks, WTR is a throwback to an earlier and more innocent time when programmers assumed that everyone watching TV was dumb.
Lots of older viewers have a hard time adjusting to shows like "NYPD Blue" and "Homicide: Life On the Street," where the camera jerks around so much it makes you seasick. But on "Walker, Texas Ranger," I'm not sure they're even using a cameraman. It seems that they just mount a camera on a tripod ant tell Chuck Norris to start kicking people's faces in for a solid hour...which he seems more than willing to do. The show also uses lots of slow motion during the fight scenes, so you can see the predictably-incompetent drug dealers get kicked in the face at various angles and speeds. This is not a great idea, because WTR already seems to be in slow motion even when it isn't.
Believability is not the show's strong point. Surely not every weekend getaway down in the bayou gets ruined by racist rednecks. And when the show aired an episode about juvenile delinquents restored to moral rectitude by their stay at a fresh-air camp, the young thugs came across as the sweetest and most innocuous-looking tykes since the Little Rascals. The writers on this show need to get out more. They could start by walking down any street in Los Angeles.
Most television shows, no matter how bad, have at least one redeeming feature. Perhaps there's an amusing costar. Maybe the actors wear preposterous costumes, or come from New Zealand, or both. "Walker, Texas Ranger" is no exception to the rule. Even though most episodes I've seen are completely unwatchable, I admire one thing about how the programs are constructed: they're scripted so Chuck Norris doesn't have to talk very much.
As Clint Eastwood once said, "A man's gotta know his limitations." I think Chuck Norris knows his.
With "Walker, Texas Ranger," CBS could be overdoing this thing just a bit. With all due respect to its millions of fans, WTR is one of the corniest and most predictable shows in prime-time history. With plot lines that were old when George Burns was young, music that seems to be a lethal fusion of the BATMAN and MANNIX scores, acting that makes William Shatner look like Marlon Brando, and dialogue that could stop THE DUKES OF HAZZARD dead in its tracks, WTR is a throwback to an earlier and more innocent time when programmers assumed that everyone watching TV was dumb.
Lots of older viewers have a hard time adjusting to shows like "NYPD Blue" and "Homicide: Life On the Street," where the camera jerks around so much it makes you seasick. But on "Walker, Texas Ranger," I'm not sure they're even using a cameraman. It seems that they just mount a camera on a tripod ant tell Chuck Norris to start kicking people's faces in for a solid hour...which he seems more than willing to do. The show also uses lots of slow motion during the fight scenes, so you can see the predictably-incompetent drug dealers get kicked in the face at various angles and speeds. This is not a great idea, because WTR already seems to be in slow motion even when it isn't.
Believability is not the show's strong point. Surely not every weekend getaway down in the bayou gets ruined by racist rednecks. And when the show aired an episode about juvenile delinquents restored to moral rectitude by their stay at a fresh-air camp, the young thugs came across as the sweetest and most innocuous-looking tykes since the Little Rascals. The writers on this show need to get out more. They could start by walking down any street in Los Angeles.
Most television shows, no matter how bad, have at least one redeeming feature. Perhaps there's an amusing costar. Maybe the actors wear preposterous costumes, or come from New Zealand, or both. "Walker, Texas Ranger" is no exception to the rule. Even though most episodes I've seen are completely unwatchable, I admire one thing about how the programs are constructed: they're scripted so Chuck Norris doesn't have to talk very much.
As Clint Eastwood once said, "A man's gotta know his limitations." I think Chuck Norris knows his.