The western’s resurgence is playing on the small screen

Over the last few years the western, that most American of film genres, has quietly been enjoying a resurgence. It hasn’t been happening on the big screen, though there have been brief, buzzed-about releases like Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, the Coen Brothers’ True Grit remake, Antoine Fuqua’s black actor focused Magnificent Seven remake, art house French favourite Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers, Jeymes Samuel’s black character revisionist Netflix smash hit The Harder They Fall and Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning The Power of the Dog. 

There are also films that are western in theme and setting — good men fighting evil in the bleak rural landscape of Texas and other middle American states — but modern in period like the Coens’ No Country for Old Men and writer Taylor Sheridan’s critically acclaimed neo-westerns Hell or High Water and Wind River.

The western is enjoying its major comeback on the small screen thanks to a slightly more open minded approach on the part of streaming service executives to take a chance on a genre that, while it enjoyed one of the most popular and profitable periods in film history until the 1960s, has since proved unpredictable for box office returns. Most significant of these has been Sheridan’s slow-burning family saga Yellowstone, which over the course of its four-season run on the Paramount Network has proved itself one of recent television’s most successful and well-loved shows.

The comeback of the western is a natural retro phenomenon that happens every few decades or so

As Sheridan’s epic saga of present day fights over land and survival in the Dutton family gets ready for its fifth season premiere in November, the show has resulted in a successful spin-off — 1883, which takes the story back to the days of the Old West. It stars veteran cowboy actor Sam Elliott as the family founder. A second spin-off, titled 1923, will take the Dutton story into the 20th century and star everyone’s favourite rugged old man, Harrison Ford.

The small-screen popularity of the western has extended into the realms of science fiction, where the first two seasons of HBO’s Westworld gave a new, complicated philosophical twist to the genre. Amazon Prime’s recent Josh Brolin-led Outer Range has also kept the genre-mashing possibilities of the western alive.

You could argue that, following the rules of pop-culture studies, the comeback of the western is a natural retro phenomenon that happens every few decades or so. But that doesn’t really account for the recent slew of western-themed TV shows and streaming films. After all, the brief return of the western to big screens in films such as Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves didn’t really signal a rush of similar releases. Something else is afoot.

From the origins of cinema and the movies’ first drama — Edwin S Porter’s 1903 western-themed The Great Train Robbery — until the 1950s when John Ford and John Wayne reigned supreme, through to the 1960s when nearly every television drama was a Western story from Gun Smoke to Rawhide, the western was the preferred genre of directors and audiences. It provided comforting reassurances of the simple times and simple black and white, good vs evil moral divides that fitted with the ideologies of  life during the Cold War.

That all changed in the 1970s when disaffection at the US’s Vietnam War fiasco and the lies of Richard Nixon made American life far more complicated, paranoid and disillusioned with the old moral codes of the West. To make matters worse, the Italians discovered they could make their own “spaghetti Western” versions far from Ford and Wayne’s beloved Monument Valley and with their own more cynical vision of their imagined America.

After the brief ascendancy of the spaghettis, the western seemed to quietly retreat from mainstream popular consciousness into the realms of nostalgia and history, unable to deal with the cynical outlook of the late 20th century.

Then, a few years ago, as we are still not allowed to forget, a terrible thing called Donald Trump happened to the US and the world. Once again, looking for some reassurance of a time when things were simpler and the battle lines more easily defined, audiences slowly began to find comfort in the archetypal tales of good white-hat wearing cowboys and bad, ruthless, black-hat sporting capitalists.

It only needed the isolation of the Covid pandemic to push audiences back into the realm of wide-open plains, horse riding heroes and lowing cattle where they could fulfil their yearning for the great outdoors and personal freedom.

Whether producers and distributors of the current trend can carry that momentum into the post-pandemic world remains to be seen but, for now, it seems audiences are very much at home on the range.

Enter western champion and filmmaker Costner to offer what may be the ultimate test of how much new audiences really enjoy westerns: his long in the making mammoth western Horizons, which he’s announced currently runs to 11 hours in length and will be released in cinemas as four 150-minute films. That’s the kind of challenge that should separate the western lovers from the western curious pretty quickly once and for all.