The website hotelscombined.com recently released a graphic of what it deemed the most iconic movie filmed in each state, with director (and Texas boy done well) Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused chosen to represent our fair state. It’s a great movie, with more than its share of iconic moments and lines, but it’s a stretch to call it the definitive Texas film, when it really could have been set at any high school in the U.S., especially if you take out Matthew McConaughey at his lecherous, drawling-est best.
The idea of Texas conjures up a lot of strong impressions. In large part, we have films and TV to thank for that. With that in mind, we tried to settle on the five most iconic television shows set in Texas—programs that shaped people’s perception of the state and added to Texans’ rich history of self-mythologizing.
1. No other show captured the cadence of suburban Texas like King of the Hill. The animated program from Mike Judge, which ran from 1997 to 2010, is set in the fictional town of Arlen, a fill-in for any community that shares a passion for lawn care, barbecue, and football. So really, most Texas towns.
Hank Hill, as the straitlaced patriarch devoted to his family and propane sales, is often the butt of jokes about his reluctance to get hip with changing times and a new generation’s priorities. Having a son who prefers prop comedy to sports doesn’t help. But the show never asks its audience to laugh at anybody, finding the sympathetic heart at a lot of Texas bluster.
Also, the image of four guys standing in an alley drinking beer has got to be up there with the ten-gallon hat and the Alamo in the ranks of Texas iconography. Yep.
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2. Imagine if John Wayne knew karate and carried a Texas Ranger badge. That’s basically what you get in Walker, Texas Ranger, (1993—2001) the Chuck Norris vehicle featuring the state’s most legendary lawmen. Part modern Western, part American kung-fu, Walker relied on and updated Texas’ reputation for brash, well-intentioned, gun-slinging cowboys.
Filmed primarily in and around Dallas, the show used a number of local landmarks, typically in set-pieces involving a shootout, a car chase, or some combination of the two. Walker never had the most nuanced take on law enforcement in Texas, but it made the rugged Ranger taking down the bad guy remain an iconic image of the state.
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3. “Texas forever” is a refrain uttered by several characters in Friday Night Lights, the fantastic drama series centered on a high school football team that drives life in a small, rural town. That phrase—along with “clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose”—seems to resonate a lot in a state not known for its humility.
Friday Night Lights checks almost every box on the “Texas high school football stereotype” list: The folksy coach with the heart of gold, the rabid fans and parents who place more value in a winning record than an education, the star player with the troubled home life and cocky attitude on and off the field. However, it gave the characters enough depth to make the archetypes seem fresh.
The show is also filmed beautifully, capturing the weird Friday night buzz of a high school football stadium that you can only experience in Texas.
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4. The program that made “Dallas” a household name was ahead of the curve in many ways: “Who shot J.R.?” would have been trending for days on Twitter had that episode aired in 2015. The oilmen, the big hats, the bigger hair—Dallas helped define a lot of the things much of the world associates with the city and state today. We’ll give a shout-out to the 2012 reincarnation of the show, but the original series (1978-1991) had more cultural cachet.
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5. In the sense than any reality TV show can be considered honest or interesting enough to be iconic, we’ll take Big Rich Texas as the representative pick for a slew of reality programs set here, for better or worse (mostly for worse). The handful of reality shows filmed in Texas follow a format similar to programs around the country–entitled people go about their daily lives and create drama where none previously existed. Perhaps to the Lone Star State’s credit, the characters on Texas reality TV always seem to go bigger and bolder. It may not be ideal or accurate, but Big Rich Texas and its portrayal of a country club life in upscale Dallas struck some kind of nerve. Hopefully the world will not judge us too harshly.
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