‘The Ranch’ Is The Most Traditionally Republican Sitcom On Television

One of my more enjoyable hobbies of late has been watching TV critics get tied up in knots about why The Ranch is so popular. Admittedly, I need to get more hobbies. But when, upon the release of the show’s “Part 2” on Netflix, Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson wrote, “These assholes won; they’re on the news every day. So why should we watch a sitcom about them, too?”, I found myself thinking.

Donald Trump won, whether we want to accept it or not. But the characters on The Ranch have never won anything, except for one low-division state football championship 15 years ago. Unlike the characters on, say, Dear White People, all of whom have glorious careers in the media awaiting them, the people populating The Ranch have no money, no health insurance, no Spotify accounts, and scant hope for the future, very little besides one another’s company and a seemingly bottomless supply of Jack Daniels and Budweiser. At the end of every drunken day, they’re losers, and that’s part of what makes the show so unintuitively compelling.

The Ranch has a “Part 6” on order, which will give it 60 episodes total. In the go-go ’90s, when mediocre shows like Just Shoot Me crapped out 24 episodes a season, that wouldn’t have been much, But in the streaming era, it’s practically War And Peace. People—maybe not people we know but people with TVs someplace out in the great American nowhere—love this show. But, I ask myself again, why?

The show’s opening episode filled my head with a horrific Luke Bryan brainworm: “Rain makes corn/corn makes whiskey/whiskey makes my baby/feel a little frisky,” a little ditty that could serve as The Ranch’s guiding principle. Its characters’ interests include, in no particular order: Sex, beer, beef, trucks, football, caps, motorcycles, hunting, whiskey, more sex, dick-punching, and more whiskey. Marriage proposals take place at Cracker Barrel, and most conversations start with “remember that time in high school?” They hate the government, take pride in hard work, and shake their heads at the changing times, except when it comes to the legalization of marijuana.

The Ranch takes place in Colorado, that purplest of states, but its population lives in Red America. I wouldn’t call it right-wing. If anything, its politics are more down the actual center of any American show I’ve seen in a while. But it’s definitely the most traditionally Republican sitcom on the air. The show manages the neat trick of turning the perpetual grievance of “The Deplorables” into entertainment.  

“The Ranch‘s politics are more down the actual center of any American show I’ve seen in a while. But it’s definitely the most traditionally Republican sitcom on the air.”

Also, it helps that, outside of Modern Family, which these days feels as stale and datedly bougie as Leave It To Beaver, The Ranch has the best cast of any American comedy on any television anywhere. Inexplicably, Ashton Kutcher has proven that he can carry a show. With his backwards baseball caps and his dirty jackets, Kutcher flop-sweats and aw-shucks his way through every scene with a performance that reminds me of, dare I say it, Ted Danson’s in Cheers. That was the last best time I can remember that a comedy mined the fertile ground of its handsome leading man also being an unwittingly misogynist idiot. It even gives Kutcher not one, but two appealing and intelligent blond romantic foils, in Elisha Cuthbert and Kelli Goss.

But then, into the midst of all the flirting and butt-sex jokes, steps the great Sam Elliott, giving a mournful, grouchy, and strangely moving performance as an old rancher at the end of his rope. If that weren’t enough, the even greater Debra Winger slings beers and listens to Bonnie Raitt and raspily wonders if that’s all there is while pondering old stills of her stunning Urban Cowboy-era hotness. More often than not, legendary sitcom actors of the past like Barry Corbin and John Amos and Wendie Malick and Jon Cryer appear to let us know they still exist. And though Danny Masterson has been evicted from The Ranch after a flood of real-life rape allegations me-tooed him out of existence, his Rooster character was consistently the red-assed country-fried center of the action, getting most of the good laugh lines and evincing thousands of tweets like “I love Rooster, Rooster’s so funny, whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?”

Well, sorry, folks, Rooster’s gone, written off with a typical Ranch-like plot contrivance. Characters are constantly leaving town, coming back into town, disappearing, reappearing, showing up in the middle of the night “just to talk,” breaking up, getting back together, walking into bars, accidentally killing animals for a laugh, screwing, not screwing, and then screwing again. They lose the ranch then get the ranch back and then lose it again.

The whole thing has been shot in multi-cam, the sets are dingy and cheap, yet lovingly familiar. Sometimes, the laugh track disappears for long stretches as the characters cry and yell and pace around one another, pausing meaningfully and trying to parse feelings. It occurred to me: This is a soap opera.

While most successful TV shows mimic soaps to some extent, they usually follow the glamorous formula of the nighttime soap, with the fancy cars and big jewelry-smashing set pieces that entails. The Ranch, on the other hand, is all subtle glances and “what are you thinking?” when it’s not making jokes about skid marks. It takes on the characteristics of a dying artform: The daytime soap. Kelli Goss got her first big break on The Young And The Restless, so she acts natural when her character shows up in doorways for no other reason than to move the story along. Elliott’s Beau Bennett, the beleaguered patriarch with a martyred love life, is basically Victor Newman with a grayer mustache and the ability to display a range of emotions.

The Ranch doesn’t have an evil twin plotline—yet. And toddlers don’t suddenly become hot teenagers overnight. Yet. But with Masterson’s departure, we’re one writer’s room decision away from entering “long-lost half-brother shows up after all these years” territory. Endgame may be upon us. But The Ranch will be on Netflix forever as an artifact of our politically confused times, somehow managing to serve as a conservative half-hour laugh-track two-hankie soap opera, starring Ashton Kutcher and Danny Masterson, set on a middle-class Colorado cattle ranch. No wonder they’re not talking about it during brunch in Los Feliz.

Neal Pollack is the author of ten bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. His latest novel is the sci-fi satire Keep Mars Weird. He lives in Austin, Texas.