A mere six hours of TV wrecked me harder than most 10-season commitments ever managed. The show is American Primeval, and it's exactly the kind of Western that explains why the miniseries format simply will not go away. Credit where it's due: Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone got the Western TV revival rolling, and it remains a sprawling family saga in love with both the American West and the genre it belongs to. Still, a good number of Westerns now surpass it — miniseries among them, going toe to toe with the classics. Yes, several of the greatest Western shows ever made ran for years. But the decades since the genre's Golden Age have made another case entirely: a flawless miniseries can land just as heavily, since character work and pacing tighten up when there's nowhere to hide. The revenge story that got overlooked The six-part Western thriller The English, starring Chaske Spencer and Emily Blunt, never got the audience it earned. Critics and viewers usually land on opposite sides when it comes to Westerns, yet this one carries an 84% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating from both camps, with The Guardian dubbing the series "a rare, sensational masterpiece." Its premise binds Pawnee native Eli Whipp to Englishwoman Lady Cornelia Locke as their journeys intersect on the plains. The land he is owed is what Eli is after. The man who murdered her son is what Cornelia is after. Neither thread ever feels like the lesser one. Praise for Blunt and Spencer ran deep, and the series unfolds like a single extended film, braiding crime, romance and history together. It also handed the genre David Melmont, one of Western television's finest villains. Finishing it in a day is technically doable. How long the ending sticks with you is another matter. Start with the prequel, not the original The second series in Sheridan's Yellowstone franchise, 1883, is a 10-episode prequel that tracks the Dutton family as they escape desperate circumstances in Texas and push west across the Great Plains in search of a fresh start. The casting is the hook here: Western mainstay Sam Elliott (Tombstone), country music's real-life couple Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, and Isabel May (Alexa & Katie), plus cameo turns from Tom Hanks, Billy Bob Thornton and Sheridan himself. Having played Elsa Dutton in this chapter, May later narrated 1923, the saga's following entry. Star wattage wasn't what won critics over, though. The grit was. This was no case of Sheridan simply restaging Yellowstone in period wardrobe. Nor do you need the flagship show to keep up. A lot of fans insist this is the proper entry point, given the Dutton history it lays out. Certain viewers call it heavy-handed, though that mostly comes down to taste, and an 89% positive critics' rating on Rotten Tomatoes indicates the praise wins out over the complaints. The Spielberg Western almost nobody watched Everything about Into the West looked huge on paper. Steven Spielberg was the producer. Few Westerns have ever fielded a deeper cast. What it became instead was the finest Western nobody remembers, accolades and all. Its ambition bordered on bizarre: north of 250 speaking parts, a narrative mixing real and invented figures, and a six-episode shape trailing the Wheeler family from the 1820s through the 1890s. Next to that, the Duttons seem like a modest little outfit. Episodes clock in at roughly two hours apiece, so the thing behaves more like a run of films. Timing was the real issue. Arriving ahead of the Western revival, it slid by unnoticed, and streaming availability was poor, so most of the people who might have watched it never found out it was there. Among the cast are Western regular Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men), Sean Astin (The Lord of the Rings), Alan Tudyk (Firefly) and Zahn McClarnon (Dark Winds). Two lives joined by a marriage between a Native American character and a white character form the spine of the story. The production collected 16 Primetime Emmy nominations and took home two. A town full of women and no preacher Few things the genre has turned out are as inventive as Godless, Netflix's seven-part entry — no small thing in a category routinely accused of predictability. It's also that rarity, a female-fronted Western. After an accident claimed most of the men, the remote mining town of La Belle is left largely to its women. Every trope a Western might promise turns up, and every stereotype gets taken apart regardless. The arrival of a young outlaw on the run prompts the town to close ranks and shield him from the gang on his trail. As for the title, the explanation is plain: there's no preacher in La Belle. Not every classic Western has aged well, and their depictions of Native American and female characters range from flat to flatly offensive. Nine years later, Godless is aging better than nearly anything beside it, sitting at 83% from critics and 85% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. The one you may need to watch in pieces Had enough frontier romanticism? Then American Primeval should fill your next weekend. Across any genre, few shows have episodes as savage as these six, full of graphic violence and grueling passages that mark it out from everything nearby. Against the backdrop of the Utah War, it follows traveler Sara Rowell, who enlists tracker Isaac Reed to guide her across the frontier. What happens is fiction. The backdrop pulls from real events that television has rarely touched. The camerawork belongs to a prestige war drama, and that choice goes a long way toward explaining its standing as one of Netflix's best Westerns. It's six hours in total, but sitting through it can be rough, so breaking it up is entirely reasonable. That heaviness isn't a defect. The emotional battering is the finest thing it has to offer. The 98% one you should get to first Now that Lonesome Dove is getting a fresh Netflix adaptation, the moment to revisit the original has never been better. Adapted from Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, it centers on two retired Texas Rangers of wildly different temperaments who resolve to settle in Montana, driving an enormous and dangerous cattle herd out of their small town and into the Montana wilderness to establish a ranch. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 98% positive from critics. Calling it one of the best Western miniseries undersells it. It's one of the best miniseries, period.
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