The teams behind the biggest western dramas on TV share their thoughts on the resurgence of the genre.
Josh Brolin has spent his career pushing the narrative boundaries of the West. Roles in resurgent Westerns such as “No Country for Old Men” and “True Grit” fortified the Oscar nominee’s place in the genre’s recent canon. His first major TV role was on ABC’s 1989 series “The Young Riders,” about the Pony Express. The year prior to “Riders,” Brolin spent 24 hours believing he’d get his big break on CBS’ “Lonesome Dove” miniseries, having been cast as Newt, an orphan in the West, alongside his all-time favorite actor Robert Duvall. But the day after getting the role, the network pulled the offer, citing a contractual obligation to eventual star Rick Schroder.
“It was the greatest moment of my life,” Brolin recalls. “It is still the most elated I’ve ever felt about anything work-related and then it left as quickly as it came. I was absolutely freaking devastated.”
This career tango Brolin has danced with the Western is deeply rooted, but he doesn’t see himself as the Westerns guy that audiences do. Recently, he wanted to do another one, so he sent his agent in search of one on television. Enter Prime Video’s “Outer Range,” an existential meditation on the strangeness of the West with a side of sci-fi intrigue. The series isn’t just a story of cowboys and territory struggles — and that’s what hooked him.
“I never want to do anything straightforward,” he says. “I find it boring. This felt like a major swing and it had all the room to fail, and I like those odds.”
“Outer Range” is a far cry from the early years of television, when the Western was king. “Rawhide,” “Gunsmoke,” “Have Gun Will Travel,” “Bonanza,” “Tales of Wells Fargo,” “Maverick” and the like were the epitome of appointment TV in the late 1950s and ’60s, defining what television could be before even it knew. They were capsules of carefully crafted Americana that portrayed the possibility of the West as an action-packed quest to be conquered in a half-hour.
“It’s no wonder the sounds and the grit of those old Westerns reached for operatic heights,” says “Outer Range” creator Brian Watkins. “The idea of a showdown is not a low-stakes, mumblecore event. It is a literal showdown, there’s a payoff at the end and the fun of that is what I hope we tapped into for ‘Outer Range.
