Reality Cowboy Stars

You’ll find honest, rugged ranch life as Booger, Cody and Bubba saddle up for a third season.

This April 26, Chris “Booger” Brown, Cody Harris and Bubba Thompson saddle up for their third season of INSP’s The Cowboy Way—Alabama, the most entertaining and least contrived of “reality shows,” which follows three hardworking cowboy ranchers and their families, an indirect outgrowth of a dating show on CMT.

Back in 2011, Bubba remembers, “Cody was on Sweet Home Alabama, Season One, and when they got to Season Three, they needed another bachelor, so Cody told them about me. We became really good friends with Producer Andrew Glassman. He liked our lifestyle and was always saying, ‘We should do a show about cowboys, how you live your life and how y’all survive.’”

The series was unsuccessfully shopped from network to network until INSP. “We’re 95-percent acquired programming. The common theme is people who live simple, honest, rugged lifestyles, whether that’s Gunsmoke or Little House on the Prairie. These guys truly represent the values of INSP,” says Craig Miller, vice president of INSP Original Programming.

He adds, “We refer to it as ‘Western adjacent.’ It doesn’t [have] to be about cowboys, but it’s a concept that someone who likes Westerns would also like.”

You won’t find bachelors on the show now. Cody and Misty were newlyweds in the pilot, and by the end of Season One, they had a son. Bubba and Kaley married and had a daughter. Booger, after a string of romantic disappointments, fell for Jaclyn, a widowed pharmacist. He married her and became a devoted stepdad to her son, in Season Two. The natural beauty and sweetness of the brides could well trigger a bachelor stampede to Alabama.