Six hours of television broke me more thoroughly than most 10-season commitments ever have. That’s American Primeval, and it’s the sort of Western that makes you understand why the miniseries format refuses to die.
Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone may have kicked off the Western TV revival, and it’s a sprawling family saga devoted to both the American West and the genre itself. But plenty of Westerns now outshine it, including miniseries that go toe to toe with the classics.
Some of the best Western shows ever made ran for years. The decades since the genre’s Golden Age have proven something else, though: a perfect miniseries can hit just as hard, because character work and pacing get sharper when there’s nowhere to hide.
The revenge story that got overlooked
Chaske Spencer and Emily Blunt’s six-part Western thriller The English deserved far more attention than it got. Westerns tend to split critics and audiences down the middle, but this one holds an 84% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating from both, with The Guardian calling the series “a rare, sensational masterpiece.”
The setup ties together Pawnee native Eli Whipp and Englishwoman Lady Cornelia Locke as their paths cross the plains. Eli wants the land he’s owed. Cornelia wants the man who killed her son. Both threads pull equally hard.
Blunt and Spencer drew serious praise, and the whole thing plays like one long film that folds crime, romance and history into each other. It also gave us David Melmont, one of the great Western TV villains.
You could technically finish it in a day. The ending will stay with you longer than that.
Start with the prequel, not the original
1883 is the second series in Sheridan’s Yellowstone franchise, a 10-episode prequel following the Dutton family as they flee dire circumstances in Texas and head west across the Great Plains looking for a fresh start.
The cast is the draw: Western veteran Sam Elliott (Tombstone), real-life country music couple Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, and Isabel May (Alexa & Katie), with cameos from Tom Hanks, Billy Bob Thornton and Sheridan himself. After playing Elsa Dutton here, May went on to narrate 1923, the next entry in the saga.
What critics responded to wasn’t the star power. It was the grit. Sheridan didn’t just rebuild Yellowstone in period costume.
And you don’t need the original to follow it. Plenty of fans argue you should start here, for the sense of Dutton history it gives you. Some viewers find it heavy-handed, which is mostly a matter of taste, and an 89% positive critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes suggests the praise outweighs the grumbling.
The Spielberg Western almost nobody watched
On paper, Into the West should have been enormous. Steven Spielberg produced it. The cast was one of the deepest ever assembled for a Western. Instead it became the best Western nobody remembers, despite a shelf of accolades.
The ambition was genuinely strange: over 250 speaking parts, a story weaving real and fictional characters, and a six-episode structure that follows the Wheeler family from the 1820s to the 1890s. The Duttons look like a small operation by comparison.
Each episode runs around two hours, so it plays more like a film series. The problem was timing. It aired before the Western revival and slipped past everyone, and it was difficult to find on streaming, which meant most potential viewers never learned it existed.
The cast includes Western veteran Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men), Sean Astin (The Lord of the Rings), Alan Tudyk (Firefly) and Zahn McClarnon (Dark Winds). The story tracks two lives connected by a marriage between a Native American character and a white character. It picked up 16 Primetime Emmy nominations and won two.
A town full of women and no preacher
Netflix’s seven-part Godless is one of the most inventive things the genre has produced, which matters in a category people constantly accuse of predictability. It’s also a rare female-fronted Western.
La Belle is an isolated mining town populated mostly by women after an accident killed most of the men. Every trope you’d expect from a Western is here, and every stereotype gets dismantled anyway. When a young outlaw on the run turns up, the town closes ranks to protect him from the gang chasing him.
The title comes from a simple fact: La Belle has no preacher.
Classic Westerns haven’t all aged gracefully, and their portrayals of Native American and female characters run from one-dimensional to outright offensive. Nine years on, Godless is holding up better than almost anything around it, with 83% from critics and 85% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes.
The one you may need to watch in pieces
If you’ve had your fill of frontier romanticism, American Primeval is your next weekend. Its six episodes are among the most brutal in any show in any genre, with graphic violence and harrowing stretches that separate it immediately from its peers.
Set against the Utah War, it follows traveler Sara Rowell, who asks tracker Isaac Reed to take her across the frontier. The story is fictional. The setting draws on real events that haven’t had many TV adaptations.
It’s shot like a prestige war drama, and that approach is a big part of why it stands as one of the best Westerns on Netflix. Six hours total, but it’s sometimes hard to sit through, so spreading it out is fair. The weight isn’t a flaw. The emotional punishment is the best thing about it.
The 98% one you should get to first
With Lonesome Dove getting a new Netflix adaptation, there’s never been a better moment to watch the original. It’s based on Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and it follows two retired Texas Rangers with wildly different temperaments who decide to settle in Montana by leading a massive, perilous cattle drive from their small town into the Montana wilderness to build a ranch.
A 98% positive critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Not just one of the best Western miniseries. One of the best miniseries, full stop.
