4 items
Three Texans with a fiddle, a banjo, and two diamond albums in two years. Wide Open Spaces and Fly made the Dixie Chicks the biggest group in country, "Goodbye Earl" made murder a sing-along, and then one sentence on a London stage in March 2003 got them pulled from country radio almost overnight.
Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose. Peter Berg's documentary-style drama about a small-town Texas football coach and his wife, Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton as Eric and Tami Taylor, never found a big audience on NBC, got rescued by a satellite-TV deal, and ran five seasons (2006–2011) that critics still rank among the decade's best.
The Queen of Tejano. Selena Quintanilla took a regional Texas-Mexican sound to Grammy stages and arena crowds, and was on the edge of English-language crossover stardom when her life was cut short in 1995 — weeks before her 24th birthday.
A Jack Russell terrier named Wishbone daydreams his way into classic literature, acting out the great stories in costume from a small Texas town. PBS's live-action oddity aired from 1995 to 1997, won a Peabody and multiple Emmys — and stopped anyway, reportedly because a literature-loving dog lacked merchandising potential.