The other day I talked about my interest in reality television as a management training tool, as well as my current fascination with the PBS reality show Texas Ranch House. I just finished watching the last two episodes in the eight-part series, and it was a wrenching (and all too compelling) viewing experience. In the end, despite a successful cattle drive, the entire crew of cowboys walked off the ranch two days before the conclusion of the experience, expressing their solidarity with a cowboy who had been unfairly fired.
As I expected, ranch "owner" Bill Cooke’s failure to knit his family and his crew into a cohesive unit, working toward common goals, proved to be his undoing. He compounded this failure with some tactical missteps [Oh, so when it comes time to negotiate final wages, after 2+ months of conciliatory management, now you’re a hardass?], but the fact that his wife, daughters and housemaid (on the one hand) and his cowboys (on the other) viewed each other not as comrades, or even as complementary teams, but as opposing forces insured that any conflicts would be magnified and that no one was going to cut anyone else some slack if there was a problem. And there were plenty of problems.
In fairness to Bill Cooke, I think the producers made it harder on him than they should have–by bringing in one new hand (to replace the three who had to leave prematurely) far too late in the process, by thrusting him repeatedly into negotiations where he had essentially zero leverage–but that said, there were quite a few things he could have done differently as the nominal leader of the enterprise.
OK, smart guy–what would you have done differently? Why, I’m so glad you asked.
- Built a sense of team identity through shared experience–in this case, regular communal dinners among everyone on the ranch. The narrator (the outstanding Randy Quaid, at times doing his level best to rein in his disbelief at various mistakes) even noted that many ranch owners and their families ate at a common table with their hands. The Cooke’s efforts to overcome the gap between them and their crew with occasional festivities were far too little, far too late.
- Spent more one-on-one time with every member of the crew. Historically inaccurate advice perhaps, but it seemed as though every time Bill Cooke was talking with one of his crew members, he was delivering bad news (sound clip), and that’s just not good.
- Used both the meals and the one-on-one talks to discuss and understand everyone’s goals and responsibilities, and to get a sense of whether they felt they were succeeding (and if not, what it would take to allow them to succeed.) Yes, I know this is an anachonistic 21st-century perspective, but despite everyone’s best efforts to achieve historial accuracy, they were still 21st-century people, and a little effort–any effort–on Cooke’s part to express concern about whether people’s individual needs were being met would have built up a store of goodwill that he could have drawn upon when tough decisions needed to be made.
- Presented a united and consistent front to his crew. Mr. and Mrs. Cooke utterly failed to understand how their dynamic as a couple affected the crew. I didn’t expect a 21st-century couple to fully embrace 19th-century gender roles, but the Cookes tried to have it both ways, seeking to manage the ranch’s affairs together while paying lip service to Mr. Cooke’s authority as ranch "owner" vis-a-vis the cowboys. As a result, Cooke lost the respect of his crew, who came to see him as a mouthpiece for his wife’s decisions. I suspect that this led Cooke to oscillate between two vastly different management styles–usually conciliatory, but occasionally hard-nosed–and this inconsistency made Cooke seem unreliable at best, disingenuous at worst.
Damn, everyone involved seemed to have a hard time, and I doubt if anyone looks back on the experience fondly. But this certainly proves Steven Johnson’s thesis that reality television is engaging not because it’s prurient, but because it’s cognitively demanding, and my corollary that these shows actually provide some of the best management and leadership training materials you could possibly ask for.
20 Responses
I think that I worked for those people, metaphorically speaking.
In Mom-and-Pop operations, so often it’s Pop who wants to be liked and Mom who plays Lady MacBeth.
I did not see the beginning of the series but, I enjoyed the last 4/5 episodes I did see. However, I think it would have been more interesting if the show focussed more on the details of daily life on a ranch in the 1800s instead of chosing participants who would force their feminist agenda. It was supposed to be a historical show. Mrs Cooke and Maura seemed to want to rewrite history instead of trying to live as people would have in the 19th century. The fact is there were clearly defined gender roles then. It doesn’t mean you have to believe they should apply today but, they agreed to live like a 19th century ranching family.
I also believe that Mr Cooke should shoulder much of the blame for the problems on the ranch. He showed little interest in learning what the cowboys actually did. When he got tired on the cattle drive he went back to the ranch. He did not show any appreciation for the greuling work the cowboys did. In addition, he kept saying his primary function was keeping the books to ensure the financial viability of the ranch but, he didn’t even do that very well. And when his wife was preassuring him to be tough with the cowboys he should have told her to manage the house better instead of letting food go to waste, leaving dirty dishes out and dressing inappropriately.
They were supposed to live like it’s 1867 but, they just hung around without a few modern day conveniences while others did the work.
Moe, I think you make some good points. I was disappointed (although not shocked) when the show’s historical assessors determined that Mr. Cooke’s record-keeping and Mrs. Cooke’s household managment had been lax. Those were supposedly the critical tasks to which they’d been dedicating themselves, but in the end they didn’t really live up to their responsibilities.
Although I understand your point about gender roles, I don’t fully agree. You see the same dynamic in every one of these faux-historical reality shows: The men relish the opportunity to step back in time, embracing the hardships and physical labor because it allows them to be men, in a very primal way. The women are initially enthusiastic, fascinated by the trappings of historical femininity, but they ultimately find it a claustrophobic, oppressive experience, and they rebel. Mrs. Cooke and Maura’s resistance to their gender roles hardly makes them unique among women participating in these sorts of shows.
I think it’s important to note that there were other behavioral anachronisms as well. I have to believe that actual ranchhands in 1867 would have been much more deferential and chivalrous toward the women. And I’d be surprised if a real ranch foreman would have been fired for shoving the cook.
But ultimately these “inaccuracies” made the show more interesting to me, not less. I enjoyed learning about life on the frontier in the 1860s, but as I hope my posts make clear, the real reason I find these shows so fascinating is because of the complex interpersonal dynamics and their implications for management and leadership training–they’re living laboratories, big-budget psychological experiments.
The shows would fail if people didn’t make an honest effort to work within the confines of the faux-historical setting. But the shows are most interesting and instructive when the participants’ contemporary selves clash with that setting. We do learn something about history through the shows’ verisimilitude (although I’d argue that if that’s your main goal, you’d be better off reading a book.) But we learn a lot more about interpersonal dynamics, leadership, and management in general.
Ed,
Very nice overview of the dense 8-hour show, which I got sucked into against my will. I generally avoid “reality TV”, but I’m a big fan of PBS, and Texas Ranch House kind of caught me off guard and lassoed me (heh) before I had a chance to run over the nearest desert ridge.
I totally agree with your bullet-point takeaways on team-building, and I appreciate your suggestion (and the intellectual cover it offers a guilty pleasure) of approaching such shows as opportunities to study team dynamics rather than actual forays into their supposed settings.
However, the composition of the teams on these shows appears explicitly designed to create as much melodramatic conflict as possible, so I wonder if such analysis is somewhat redundant. In other words, if producers cast people in roles that will likely exacerbate divisions of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, or whatever, perhaps there’s no real point in watching the situation play out as expected and then concluding that the team would have been better off if certain steps had been taken to mitigate divisions of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, or whatever.
On the other hand, I do find it fascinating and instructive that those very divisions are so close to the surface of modern life that it’s easy for TV producers to tap into boiling reservoirs of deep hostility. As you point out, modern men eagerly and almost unconsciously embrace pre-modern gender roles while modern women uniformly reject them. Class divisions are similarly easy to bring to the fore, as the Cooke family aptly demonstrated with their haphazard tyranny and transparent shows of occasional and begrudging magnanimity.
Of course, race is perhaps the most cutting of America’s dividing lines, and I found it intriguing that the producers tip-toed around issues of racism by presenting Buffalo Soldiers, Comanches, and Mexicans in a strictly modern intellectual context. This was one area where anachronistic behavior was most definitely expected. Perhaps the wounds are still too wide open, still bleeding, still being plundered, to explore with any notion of romanticism.
In the end, despite my fascination, I must admit that there’s something a little nauseating about watching people get utterly, passionately invested in petty power struggles that are actually completely fictional. What’s worse is that I find _myself_ getting invested, hoping that Lady MacBeth will get her comeuppance and the good cowboys will ride off into the sunset with their whiskey and their dignity. That’s kind of a lame place to be. After such an experience, I feel like I need to take a shower.
Well, at least it’s PBS. And at least I learned the original purpose of wearing chaps.
Peace,
Kai
I’m happy to see others discussing this show.
Back when I was a Boy Scout, the book said that the leader had two goals:
Accomplish the tasks
Keep the group together.
Mr. Cooke forgot – if he ever knew – that if you didn’t consciously pursue both, you failed at both.
The assessors were right on their criticism of the Cookes.
If he had periodic productivity goals, he should have communicated them, so many saddle hours / day, so many head per week.
He could have used scrambled eggs as a reward.
He could have said if you round up so many head of cattlr, I’ll raffle off a horse or something.
Above all, he should have realized that in that context, labr was scarce. But he and Mrs Cooke took the 21st century reality of surplus labor and comboined it with a 17th century aristocratic attitude and utterly failed.
Congratulations to you, however, in understanding the series’ value as a mean of discussing leadership.
Kai, many thanks. I think you’re right that there’s a gross discrepancy between the way all these shows (not just “Texas Ranch House”) address race and the way they address gender. That’s a rich topic for further discussion. And I’m sure that the producers select with a certain degree of “combustibility” in mind, but even so, I don’t think that diminishes the shows’ value as a teaching tool about interpersonal dynamics, because the combustible situations are the ones we need to study and learn from. And yes, all this is great intellectual cover for a guilty pleasure!
Nice post, Chas. I agree that boundary-setting (and inconsistency in management style) was a key issue for the Cookes, and I have no doubt that Mr. Cooke wields a mean PowerPoint. (But I actually do think that the timely use of some contemporary management techniques (team-building, individual goal-setting, check-ins) would have helped immensely, and they’d have been all the more effective for the lack of PPT decks.)
Thanks, Tim. Great insight that building the team and staying on task must be pursued jointly. And I love the incentives, although I’d use whiskey instead of eggs 🙂
Hi Ed and all. I too watched nearly all of “TRH” when originally not intending to. I initially also shared most of the sentiments expressed by most here about the Cookes and the cowboys.
With a few days to digest though I am trying to see if maybe my initial assesment was fair. I found some interesing reading here. This is a link to a transcipt of an online chat at washingtonpost.com which took place last Wednesday. It included Lisa Cooke (Lady MacBeth?), Ignacio (Nacho) Quiles, the original ranch cook and Jody Sheff, Executive Producer.
One thing which Lisa Cooke said made me realize how quick people can be to judge. She made the statement that they lived on the ranch for over 1800 hours, we only got to see 8 hours. I’ll go further than that and say that we only got to see the 8 hours the producers and directors chose to show us. The 8 hours that were filtered through their own agendas, preconceptions and biases.
She pointed out a specific instance in which the narration of the show was inaccurate. When the Cookes first arrive at the ranch and are brought to the house, the narration states the Cookes asked to eat alone, altering the plans which the cowboys had for a communal dinner. Mrs. Cooke states that they indeed asked the cowboys to join them for dinner but that the cowboys themselves declined.
She also revealed something which may call into question your central thesis that these shows provide excellent experiments in management. It was the producers of the show who decided that Stan (the Colonel) would have to leave the project after his shoving match with Ignacio. They then asked Bill Cooke to “fire” him so they could film it. I think this raises the serious question of how much Bill Cooke was really allowed to manage the ranch. Did he have to clear decisions with the producers? Were the producers making suggestions which they new would “up the confilict quotient” to make better television? Did they suggest trying to integrate Maura into the ranch hands? (I admit that I have no evidence that they did. I just know that if I were producing the show I would have thought that it would make some great footage.)
I guess my point is that maybe we should be drawing too strong a conclusion about anything based on what we see on a “reality” televsion show. Even though it was on PBS I believe there was much more television than reality.
Cheers.
Thanks, Kevin. It’s certainly worth noting that on any reality show we see only a tiny fraction of what actually happens, and what we do see is obviously filtered through the production apparatus with the goal of being entertaining.
And although that should give us pause before we draw lasting conclusions about the characters, values and intelligence of the participants, I disagree that it undermines the value of these shows as teaching tools for management training.
Any such tool–a parable, a case study, a role-playing exercise, a television show–is simply a representation of reality filtered through someone’s lens. None of these things are “real,” but they all have tremendous value as illustrations of how we might act in similar circumstances, and as examples to emulate or to avoid.
All the editing in the world could not have made Mrs. Cooke appear to be saying, “They don’t understand — they wouldn’t have jobs without ranch owners” if she didn’t. But by saying that, she’s exhibiting an elitist attitude and neglecting to recognize that it’s a two-way street. Ranch owners wouldn’t have ranches without hands!
All the editing in the world could not have made Mr. Cooke appear to be trying to make a little more profit by bilking his staff on the final payday if he wasn’t actually doing it. He never fully recognized or appreciated what the hands were going through, how hard they worked, or how quickly they learned to do their difficult (and dangerous! — horses & longhorn cattle are a risky mix) jobs.
The ranch hands weren’t perfect, but the foremen earned their respect and it showed. Mr. Cooke never earned it. I used to work for a guy like that and it was the worst job of my life. He didn’t understand what I did, never bothered to learn what it was so he could properly evaluate me, and eventually lied about my performance in order to be able to fire me. Not unlike what Mr. Cooke did to Jared the ranch hand, which led to the whole staff walking off the ranch together. ****shudder**** There are managers all over the country who are elitists like that — treat us employees like children or robots, take all the credit for themselves, make terrible management decisions that leave us short-staffed, fail to recognize accomplishments or loyalty or just plain old hard work, and then wonder why nobody likes them.
Thanks, Sparki. Although editing was almost certainly used in “Texas Ranch House” to highlight certain conflicts and increase the show’s entertainment value, I agree that we can still draw some useful conclusions from comments and actions such as the ones you mention.
That said, I think we need to make a distinction between (on the one hand) using the show as a learning tool and assessing the participants’ responses to various situations, and (on the other hand) making value judgments about the participants’ as individuals.
The former strikes me as a useful exercise because these shows do a reasonably good job of simulating reality, creating actual conflicts that the participants must struggle to resolve, with a vested interest in the outcome.
But the latter strikes me as useless and even counterproductive, simply because there’s so much footage we’ll never see, and so much we’ll never really know about the participants as people. As real as they seem, these shows are still just representations of reality, and we should temper our conclusions accordingly.
I can tell you as a foreman on a large ranch in West Texas and learning history from my father also a ranch foreman and owner and his brothers also ranch foreman that a lot of the blame can be placed on Mr. Cooke. My family sat many nights with the ranchowners family when I was growing up . We had dinners together and even picnics. We also worked together as a team. The owner of the ranch was right beside my dad doing everything he did. They were equally involved. in the 25 years of watching them together not once did they fire a hand. They settled their differences by talking. I never saw my mother or the ranchowners wife get involved in ranch biusness. They were both tough women but they let their husbands handle the problems of the ranch while they handled us kids and the house. Thats the way we were brought up and our fathers and mothers were brought up.
If Mrs Cooke would have tended to the house her girls and let Mr Cooke run the ranch along with his forman the ranch would have no doubt survived and prospered.
Thanks, Jeffery. As I noted in my post, I fully agree that a sense of team identity developed through shared experience (such as regular meals together) would have allowed the Cookes and their hands to be more successful, and the Cookes could have done much more to make that happen.
And if your dad and his ranch owner went 25 years without firing anyone, they must be 1) astute judges of character who hired the right people, and 2) highly adept at defusing interpersonal conflicts. You should interview them on their management techniques and write an article. (And I’m dead serious about that.)
All that said, it’s still important to note that the Cookes were operating within the constraints of a television show, and although I think shows like Texas Ranch House can serve as useful teaching tools for management techniques, we should be careful before judging the participants too harshly for their shortcomings. For example, it’s my understanding that the TV producers made the decision to fire the Colonel after his fight with Ignacio, and they then asked Mr. Cooke if he would carry out the firing on camera for them. Cooke certainly made his share of mistakes, but that wasn’t one of them.
This highlights an interesting tension between two radically different points of view with regard to reality shows and my perspective on them as teaching tools. Some people feel that the extensive editing and the artificial setting essentially turn these shows into fiction and that there’s no way we can really learn from them.
Others view these shows as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and they seem to think that a few hours of video footage provides them with deep insights into the participants moral characters.
Both extremes are absurd. We need to bear in mind that we typically see about 1% of the footage that was actually shot, and TV producers will always edit that footage to highten its entertainment value (even on PBS), so we should withhold judgment on reality show participants as individuals.
However, if the participants are acting in good faith (and I believe they were on Texas Ranch House), the artificiality of the setting has no bearing on reality of the emotions they felt and the choices they made during the show. I firmly believe that we can view these shows as “elaborately staged group psychology experiments,” in Steven Johnson’s phrase, and that we can learn a great deal about how (and how not) to handle conflicts, motivate people and tackle any number of management challenges.
After watching Texas Ranch House, I asked my mother about her experiences growing up on a large family farm in Kansas. She was born on the farm in 1911 and lived there until leaving for secretarial school in Chicago in 1929.
She told me that the farm hands were part fo the family. The cooking for the whole farm, both for her family and for the farm hands, was done in the same kitchen and they mostly ate the same food. The family and the farm hands ate separately, except for the big after church Sunday meal. My mother remembers her grandfather and father working closely with all of the farm hands. They always worked right along side the hands and never acted like the big boss.
My mother said that she and her brothers and sisters, and cousins, all had their share of farm chores. She started at a young age feeding chickens and geese. And, the children took direction from the experienced hands.
I think Mr. Cook got off to a very bad start when he gave the hands his set of rules in such a condescending manner and it went down hill from there. I can’t believe that any ranch or farm could have been successful with the Cook family’s attitude. When I described the show to my mother, she said that the Cooks would have been back in the big city after the first season. Which was the assessment of the experts.
Oh, I’ve been looking for a place to discuss this show! I think you make some very salient points about management techniques, and Mr. Cooke would certainly be right at home with a clipboard. However, having grown up with my dad owning 300 acres in Texas and running 150 or so head of cattle, I can tell you that no one worked that ranch harder than my dad. He could work his hired help into the ground. I think that’s where Mr. Cook missed getting the memo–a ranch owner is definitely *not* mid-level management. An example of how to do it right could be taken from the foreman, who earned the respect of the cowboys by working every bit as hard as they did. When the going got tough (on the cattle drive), Mr. Cooke got going (home). I can also tell you my mom did not make decisions affecting the ranch–sorry, that’s just how it was. She ran the home, and summers were spent “putting up” food for winter, not doing crafts and lording it over the hired help. The workers were considered as extended family and we certainly never felt better than anyone as “owners”. I, too appreciate the human experiment that Ranch House was, and I am curious if the gender issues would have been such an issue had Mr. Cooke been able to create more of a “team”? (although Mrs. Cooke’s point was well taken about the show being only 8 hours of 1800)
Thanks, Barb. Great comments. I think you put your finger on a very important point when you mention the intersection of gender issues and the (lack of) team spirit. Mr. Cooke and Mrs. Cooke might have both done better jobs if they’d recognized that they were really leaders of two separate sub-teams running the ranch and the household, respectively. That would have enabled them to take full responsibility for their own areas of authority, and specifically would have given Mrs. Cooke a greater opportunity to lead in her own right. Instead, they tried to operate (sort of) as a CEO and a VP, with responsibility for the entire operation, which led to all sorts of problems (the ranch hands resented Mrs. Cooke’s involvement in their affairs, and yet Mr. Cooke was spread too thin to do an effective job with the household accounting.) Had Mr. Cooke been more hands-on, and had Mrs. Cooke focused her skills on organizing the household, they both would have been more effective, and I think the gender issues would have been less divisive.
Of course, it’s important to note that had they been more successful, we would have learned a lot less. Rather than simply fault them for their shortcomings, let’s also be sure applaud them for doing the best they could with what they had to work with, and thank them for the courage to serve as guinea pigs in this very complicated experiment.
I know I am over a year late in posting here but I have only just now seen the PBS program “Texas Ranch House.” My husband and I checked it out at the library and watched all eight one hour episodes yesterday. We have been talking about it ever since. What a lot to think about and digest! I very much enjoyed reading everything posted , finding many of our ideas echoed here.
One thing that I have thought about a lot today was the inaccuracy of the roles of the women on the program. It seems that they really weren’t expected to portray women in in 1867 as the men were expected to portray their parts. I am thinking that the women had entirely too much time on their hands, which led to boredom, dissatisfaction, and discension! If Mrs. Cooke, her daughters, and Maura had been involved in doing their real work— important jobs of harvesting the garden and “putting up” food to keep the ranch going during the upcoming winter months—they would have earned the respect of the ranch hands and been able to fall asleep at night knowing that they, too, were making invaluable contributions to the project.
Sometimes former colonels have trouble adapting to leadership outside the parameters and contstraints of the military.
Colonel Johnson could not abide recalcitrance and shoved the cook. Like General Patton slapping the private. Should he have been fired for this? The producers thought so. Who knows.
I realize there were gender roles in 1867, and I think Mrs. Cook and Maura could have adhered better to these. However, I do agree with one statement Maura made that a select few of the cowboys “embraced” this lifestyle. Robby, for example, made it clear that he believed men should be the ones doing cowboy work, but what made an able, experienced young woman like Maura unqualified to do the same work as Jared or Anders or Johnny? The cowboys made comments when she began working with them that she was doing well and they liked he attitude.
But i did have a problem with Maura going on the cattle drive as a cowgirl while Shaun cooked. Mr. Cooke mentioned to Mrs. Cooke that Shaun had, in accepting the role as cook, requested that he be able to ride on the cattle drive. Shaun did well in his role as cook (because of, I believe, his willingness to do his best and his positive attitude), but I feel bad that he had to miss out because of it.
Being a very late comment, most likely the last in this chain, I have the benefit of reading all of what was said, and adding my own two cents.
I’ve watched all 8 episodes on DVD. And I think it can be summed up that both sides, the ranch hands and the owners, made their own share of missteps. Both sides also showed admirable and gallant behavior. This means that both parties had their own biased side of the story, and the fair truth is somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately, this was also mitigated by a third bias, that of the show’s producers. So even talking about this show in a fair manner presents one with a sticky situation.
While it can be acknowledged that only 8 hours of the 1800 hours on the ranch were shown, edited with the bias of the show’s producers, some of the documented events that were said and shown on camera point to a few undeniable truths. Though none of us viewers will know everything that happened there, we are given snippets and snapshots of information that independent of context, reveal and reflect the actual conditions.
With all that said, the show’s professional evaluators had the best vantage point. They trained the show’s participants and therefore had a chance to get to know the participants on a personal level. With their combined specialized and professional knowledge and experience, their views as arbiters provide the best assessment of the situation.
Anybody who cannot accept or respect the evaluation is too far within their own bias to admit and own up to personal culpability. Unless the evaluation was tampered with or altered, which cannot be ruled out, that is the situation in a nutshell.
On a personal note, I thought Jared was cheated. Mr. Cooke shook Jared’s hand and gave him his word to sell to Jared Brownlow the horse for 25 dollars at the end of the show (on payday). Regarding the kidnapping and rustling of horses, Mr. Cooke said in his own words to the Comanche Chief that Jared’s life was not being traded for. Mr. Cooke saying that he bought Jared’s freedom and that he repurchased Brownlow in the Comanche exchange as an excuse for going back on his word and not only charging more for the horse, but short changing Jared’s pay to $19.15 total was downright wrong and a despicable thing to do. Robbie (the foreman) was paid $105 and Anders (a fellow ranch hand) was paid $60, so it’s safe to assume that Jared should have been paid much more than $19.15 for 3 month’s work.
–Mr. Cooke docked Jared’s pay in a very self-justified, definitely non-GAAP accounting practice way; in essence, charging and punishing Jared for the Comanche raid. Regardless of Mr. Cooke’s reasoning that Jared had his own horse stolen from him, of which Mr. Cooke repurchased, the original agreement was a “man-to-man” deal in which on pay day, Mr. Cooke would sign over the title of the horse to Jared. In effect, this meant that Jared never had title to the horse, meaning that the horse had always belonged to Mr. Cooke, nullifying his argument. This meant that in fact, when the horse was stolen and Jared was kidnapped, the horse did still indeed belong to Mr. Cooke as the title to the horse never changed hands. Unless the title to the horse changed hands unreported off camera, that is the situation.
The dealing with the inventory theft and repurchase should have been viewed as an unavoidable business expense and should have been absorbed by the ranch as a business. There are much more unclaimed cattle on the range available to bring in money to make up for the loss. Jared as an experienced ranch hand is invaluable in helping the ranch not only make up for the lost money, but in generating even more income. What’s worse was that Mr. Cooke subsequently fired Jared because Jared was rightfully and understandably upset and disagreeable. That simply wouldn’t be an acceptable nor a justified thing to do in any time period. It was simply somebody in a position of power abusing it and crossing the line. You don’t cheat hard working and valued employees out of their own pay and then fire them.
There are far too many more things to go into and nitpick and acknowledge, and give and take credit for. But as comments go and me as an outside viewer it is really not for me to judge, and will allow myself just that one indulgence.
Jared if you’re reading this I hope the show’s producers, who I presume had the ultimate authority, saw fit to compensate you properly. If not with Brownlow, in some other fashion.
All the best,
Mike
Whoa, where have I been. I thought TRH was a new show! Anyway, I only have one comment: I was really surprised the ranch hands weren’t appreciated more. I think they would’ve felt more willing to help, and to do even more work, if they were treated like equals. I know if I had some men doing work outside for 14-16 hours a day in 100 degree heat, I’d give them two servings of food for every one of mine, just to thank them for me not having to be out in the heat. Yes, cooking and washing is tough but NO WHERE NEAR as tough as hard manual labor like building fences and herding longhorns. And, I’m just really surprised that it never occurred to anyone to be more selfless.