The first thing I see is the flash of brown cowboy boots across my T.V. I begin to settle down as some cheesy country song starts to play over the opening scene of the second season of “My Life With the Walter Boys,” which was released Aug. 28.
This teen drama follows Jackie Howard, a young girl from New York. After Jackie’s parents die, she is forced to move in with the family of her mom’s best friend on their ranch in Colorado, with their eight children. She is thrown into a love triangle between two brothers, Alex and Cole Walter, and struggles to choose between the two.
After watching the underwhelming first season in 2023, I expected the second season to be an overly cringy, cowboy version of the stereotypical teen love triangle show. Unfortunately, I couldn’t have been more right.
The second season of “My Life With the Walter Boys” is just as chock-full of unrealistic stereotypes of cowboys and city folk as the first season was.
Every one of the eight Walter boys in the show was made out to be some uneducated farm hand who knows nothing about life outside of a horse stall. Their entire community is made out to lack culture and put high school football above all else. These stereotypes are not only false for a small farm town, but also overused and uninteresting.
To pair with these assumptions of small-town life, the writing of the show was incredibly cringy. The characters expressed their emotions throughout the show in a way that no real person would actually express themselves. I found myself curling up on the couch and squeezing my eyes shut at almost every scene, after hearing how Jackie couldn’t decide between two of the hottest boys in town and how her life was just “so hard.”
After I managed to look past the bad writing and plot holes, I found that I couldn’t get past the characters themselves — they were revolting.
I was extremely annoyed with the actions of Jackie and her lack of self-respect and empathy. Time after time, Jackie ignored the feelings of the family caring for her, proving that she didn’t truly care about any of the Walters. She put up walls and blatantly ignored many of the family’s attempts to talk to her in exchange for wallowing in her own feelings. I was also appalled watching one of the love interests, Cole, embarrass himself over and over again, by getting into fights and changing his mind about what he wants to do in life at the last minute.
Although “My Life With the Walter Boys” was one of the cringiest and most unoriginal shows I’ve seen, even more so than the first season, it did provide some level of entertainment. At some points, it got so bad that it was good, and I found myself wanting to finish it — if only to gain some closure. But who wants to watch a show that terrible?
The small amounts of mind-numbing entertainment aren’t enough for me to recommend the series of cowboy cliches that “My Life With the Walter Boys” is.
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