"The Ranch" and the Reefer

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

In my continuing series, "Streaming Shows I Catch Up With That Turn Out to Feature Weed," I've been watching The Ranch (2016-2020) on Netflix. I got sucked in by the theme song "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys," sung by Lucas Nelson in duet with Shooter Jennings, whose dads Willie and Waylon won a Grammy with their hit version of the Ed & Patsy Bruce song in 1978. 

Set on a Colorado cattle ranch, the show stars its co-producer Ashton Kutcher, who played the dumb jock Michael Kelso on That '70s Show. Here he plays Colt, a prodigal son who returns to work at his family's ranch after his spotty semi-pro football career ends. Kutcher said that growing up in Iowa, the show he most related to was Roseanne, about "the ideals and beliefs and values" of a small-town family, "and that's what we set out to make a show about." 

Also starring as Colt's brother Rooster is Danny Masterson, who played the smart-ass pot dealer Hyde on That '70s Show. Their characters are (somewhat) grown-up versions of their sitcom ones in this show with a lot of heart and humor, featuring guest spots from Fez (Wilmer Valderrama, here playing a Mexican worker who gets deported after the boys get into a bar fight), Kitty (Debra Jo Rupp as Colt's wine guzzling, Xanax-popping mother-in-law), and Red (Kurtwood Smith, playing a neighbor with cancer who talks about how strong his medical pot is).  Another recurring character is the family lawyer played by Martin Mull, who expresses a fondness for magic mushrooms. 

The Ranch is soaked in alcohol, with the characters guzzling Budweisers and whiskey throughout, and Debra Winger co-starring as the boys' mother Maggie who runs a bar in their small town. Marijuana is first mentioned in the series, which has been praised for its country music soundtrack, when Maggie sings along to Ashley Monroe's "Bring Me Weed Instead of Roses" while waiting for her estranged husband Beau (Sam Elliott) to come visit her (Season 1, Episode 10).

Explaining why she suddenly left Beau, Maggie tells him, "Next thing you know I'm ordering two beef and cheddars and and a Jamocha shake at an Arby's in Utah. I skipped the part where I smoked a joint in the parking lot....I needed to go somewhere and figure out what I wanted to do with my life." She tries to convince him to spend time traveling with her, but Beau, a no-nonsense rancher who loves steak and his Ford, and says things like, "I'll visit Mt. Rushmore when they put Ronald Reagan on it," can't be budged from his ranch. 
 

Much like in That '70s Show, where the joint is never depicted in the pot-smoking circle in the basement where the characters get high, characters in The Ranch talk about weed but aren't shown smoking it, with the exception of Colt's girlfriend Abby (Elisha Cuthbert) smoking a cigarette that (apparently) turns out to be weed. Beau's love interest Joanne (Kathy Baker) says to a fellow waitress, "You tell them the specials while I go and smoke a joint in the bathroom." After Beau and Maggie have a fight, she says, "I went home, smoked a joint, and sucked the middles out of a box of twinkies." 

Maggie has a fling with the more-gorgeous-than-ever Lou Diamond Phillips playing the reformed alcoholic and drug-addicted musician Clint, from whom she requests "Angel from Montgomery" by John Prine. He says stuff like, "Weed and lava lamps, that was the Ambien of the '70s." Maggie gets out of town and follows Clint to his next gig, and the next morning says her escape feels like "when you're 17 years old and it's the first day of summer vacation, and you just discovered where your sister hides her weed. I don't want to lose that feeling." (Season 3, Episode 10.) 

Winger surreptitiously smoked a joint in the car in An Officer and a Gentlemen, and in Terms of Endearment she smoked with her friend the night before her wedding, while wearing her veil (shown). Rarely has an actress ever burst on the scene with more realism and earthy physicality (see her sex scenes in Officer and riding a mechanical bull in Urban Cowboy). She also appeared in The Sheltering Sky based on the book by Very Important Pothead Paul Bowles.  

Elliott appeared on "Grace and Frankie" as a love interest for Jane Fonda, shared a joint with Lily Tomlin in Grandma, and smoked Platinum Cookies with Nick Offerman in The Hero, after which he is prompted to speak an ad for the strain in his basso profundo voice that "could shell a shit ton of weed, my friend." 

Masterson's character Rooster on The Ranch, who didn't exactly treat women well, was written out of the show in 2018 after the actor was accused of drugging the drinks of three women and raping them; he was found guilty on two counts and faces 30 years in prison. When Rooster disappears, his lady friend Mary (Megyn Price) asks Joanne, who moves to the ranch when her house is destroyed in a wildfire, "Got any weed?" Joanne responds, "When your house burns down, you go through that pretty quick." So instead they share a Xanax. 

In a later episode, Mary turns down a grief support group, saying, "If I'm going to sit around in a circle with a bunch of people, they'd better be passing a joint." After Kutcher's Punk'd co-conspirator and recovering drug addict Dax Shepard joins the cast, Mary's family does an intervention due to her pill addiction after she nearly overdoses. A single mother also raising her fatherless grandchildren, Mary objects to the better-off Maggie calling her an addict "just after she [Maggie] put down her bong." Rupp's character (Abby's mother) also likes her Xanax, and wine before noon, but isn't considered an addict. Joanne, who mentions hiding her weed in her sister's room as a teen, comes down with Alzheimer's, something for which cannabis shows promise as a treatment or even a preventive. 

Winger as the family matriarch Maggie, who dresses in hippie-patterned shirts, goes off to save sea turtles and protests an oil pipeline. She ironically remarks in Season 4, Episode 10, "I just want to finish up [working at her bar], smoke a joint, and eat a whole pan of brownies." But at her job she pushes alcohol instead of opening a healthier cannabis consumption lounge. At Rooster's memorial, Maggie says she imagines her son having, "A beard-off with Jesus, trying to convince him to turn water into Bud Lite." As the ancient "wines" were psychoactive mixtures, it's too bad the characters on The Ranch aren't depicted as reaching for something higher in the consciousness realm. 

At the end of the series, Maggie returns from a trip to Florida to announce she's moving there to live communally, telling her family, "It's not a bunch of old hippies getting high. Well, it's not just a bunch of old hippies getting high." She and Joanne joke about the weed she's leaving behind, but they don't smoke any of it together. Ironically Maggie moves from a state that's become known for legal marijuana, Colorado, to a state where it's still illegal and the governor / presidential candidate has flip flopped on the issue.

Kutcher captured by
Billy Kidd for Esquire.

"In the 2000s and 2010s, Ashton Kutcher gained a reputation for throwing outlandish, wild, and weed-infused parties in LA – see [his first wife] Demi Moore’s memoir for reference," says USA Today. Kutcher told Rolling Stone that the Bush twins smoked pot at a party at his house in 2002. The 44-year-old actor and father of two (with That '70s Show co-star Mila Kunis) did an in-depth interview with Esquire for a January 2023 article, which says that, "Kutcher’s partying days, which mainly involved weed and alcohol, are a distant memory. 'I haven’t done a drug in ten years,' he offers before quickly backtracking a little. There was that THC mint he took in Italy at a friend’s wedding. 'That shit did not go well.'" 

As he tells it, the actor had just had a vasectomy, and after the mint kicked in he imagined he had lost all feeling from the waist down. He panicked (as many do on a THC-edible overdose) and, after getting his wife to show him the way to their room, looked at their finances and decided they were broke because (he discovered the following day) he'd moved a decimal point.

Kunis as seen on 

tokin.jew

Meanwhile, Kunis, whose character Jackie dated Kelso on That '70s Show—until she started seeing Hyde after impressing him by scoring a bag of pot—has lately been stumping for Jim Beam bourbon. Shepard's wife Kristen Bell has been honest about her weed smoking, and her sober husband supported her after her admission caused some flap, tweeting, "That would be like a diabetic expecting their partner to never eat dessert. Get real!" When someone tweeted, "Except sugar isn't illegal," Shepard responded, "Either is weed in California." (You're welcome.) Bell started a CBD skin care company called "Happy Dance" which has shuttered "as it turns out people just want to get high." She's now partnered with the telemedicine provider Hers to connect women with doctors who will prescribe pharmaceuticals for their mental health. Kunis and Bell co-starred in the "Bad Moms" movies.