Walker, Texas Ranger

Walker, Texas Ranger premiered on CBS on April 21, 1993 and ran for eight seasons, ending on May 19, 2001. For most of that time it anchored the network's Saturday night, and for a whole generation it is the reason Chuck Norris is a household name.

The premise

Norris plays Cordell Walker, a Texas Ranger and Vietnam veteran of part Cherokee descent (a detail borrowed from Norris's own heritage), who polices Dallas and the wider state with a modern badge and a very traditional moral code. The series was built loosely on the template of Lone Wolf McQuade, the 1983 film in which Norris had played a Ranger of the same temperament.

The cast

• Clarence Gilyard as James Trivette, Walker's partner, a former Dallas Cowboys player turned Ranger.
• Sheree J. Wilson as Alex Cahill, the assistant district attorney who becomes Walker's wife.
• Noble Willingham as C.D. Parker, retired Ranger and owner of the bar where much of the series' talking happens.
• Judson Mills as Francis Gage and Nia Peeples as Sydney Cooke, added in later seasons.

Norris's brother Aaron Norris directed many episodes and served as a producer, keeping the show's fight choreography grounded in real martial arts.

The theme song

"Eyes of a Ranger" was sung by Norris himself. It is not, by any objective measure, a great vocal performance, and that is precisely why it became beloved. It was later recorded with Norris in a version that plays over the closing credits, and it turned up on karaoke lists for years.

By the numbers

• Eight seasons, nearly 200 episodes.
• A 2005 television movie, Walker, Texas Ranger: Trial by Fire, revisited the characters.
• Reruns kept the show in syndication for two decades, on Hallmark, USA and later streaming.

The Conan O'Brien lever

In 2004, Late Night with Conan O'Brien introduced the "Walker, Texas Ranger Lever." Conan explained that NBC's parent company had acquired the rights to the show, and that pulling a lever on his desk would play a random clip with no context. The clips, chosen for maximum absurdity, became a recurring hit. The lever ran for years, and its fond, slightly baffled celebration of the show is the direct ancestor of the Chuck Norris facts, which appeared on internet forums within a year. The facts history page picks up the story from there.

The 2021 reboot

In January 2021 The CW premiered Walker, a reimagining starring Jared Padalecki as Cordell Walker. It ran for four seasons and spawned a prequel, Walker: Independence. Norris was not involved, and said so cheerfully in interviews, but the reboot's existence is a measure of how deeply the original had lodged in American pop culture.

This section is written and maintained by the NothingButChuck editorial team. Biographical details are drawn from public reporting and Chuck Norris's own memoirs; we welcome corrections through the contact page. Jokes elsewhere on the site are jokes. This section isn't.