Walker, a rethink of ‘90s crime drama Walker, Texas Ranger, premieres on The CW Jan. 21. Jared Padalecki, who played Sam Winchester on CW hit Supernatural, plays Cordell Walker, a widower who returns home to Austin, Texas after being undercover for nearly a year, and resumes his role as father.
Kale Culley and Violent Brinson play his children.
Keegan Allen, Molly Hagan, Lindsey Morgan and Mitch Pileggi are also in the cast.
“The series closely follows Walker as he tries to balance all the new details in his old life while growing increasingly suspicious about the circumstances surrounding his wife’s death,” said The CW.
Genevieve Padalecki plays Walker’s wife.
Walker, Texas Ranger lasted for eight seasons on CBS, ending in 2001. Chuck Norris played Walker.
Walker is written and executive produced by Anna Fricke, and executive produced by Dan Lin and Lindsay Liberatore and Jared Padalecki. CBS Television Studios produces the show in association with Rideback.
Fricke said the series came to be after Padalecki brought up the idea. “Jared and I sat down and talked about the character,” she said. “Jared and I had this great initial conversation about the kind of stories we wanted to tell, the kind of character we saw Cordell Walker as, and I think we hit it off.”
Padalecki said the idea came after seeing immigrants put in cages after arriving in America on the news. “I read a story about a law enforcement agent who couldn’t bring themselves simply to put a three-year-old in a cage and take them away from their parents. And they said something to the effect of, I have a three-year-old. I couldn’t bring myself to do that,” he said. “That empathy and that emotion struck me as something, caught between the inevitable rock and a hard place where you’re bound by duty, but you still have a moral code and you see people as human beings, not as perpetrators.
“We started talking about how interesting it would be to see that story told,” he continued, “where somebody who is a proud government worker in law enforcement still thinks to themselves, you know, there might be a better way.”
