When screenwriter Scott Frank was taking his script for Godless—then planned as a film rather than a TV miniseries—around to studios, he recalls that he was inevitably greeted with enthusiasm, but of entirely the wrong kind. “Oh, you wrote a Western,” the suits would say. “I really hope someone else makes it.” In today’s Hollywood, Westerns are regard as politically malodorous relics of a white-guy Manifest Destiny era.
Netflix not only bought Godless on the spot but suggested tripling its length to turn it into a TV miniseries.
Godless is a classic Western, the sort with big skies, wide prairies, gorgeous desolation, thundering herds, and smoking six-shooters, writes Glenn Garvin in his review of the series (available now on Netflix). There are good men with failed nerves and bad men who get worse. Morality clashes with survival and doesn’t always win.
But Frank has deftly moved the terms of the debate into the new millennium, without any sense of heavy-handed political correction looming overhead. The result is a series that feels both traditional and new, with the big-screen qualities of a film and the story and character nuance of the best serialized television.
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