Evan Rachel Ward in Westworld, which is shot through with the gun-toting brio that enthralled audiences in the genre's heyday. Photo / Supplied
Evan Rachel Ward in Westworld, which is shot through with the gun-toting brio that enthralled audiences in the genre's heyday. Photo / Supplied
In the new Paramount Network series Yellowstone, the Dutton family owns the largest contiguous ranch in the United States, a swathe of Montana wild that's comparable in size to Rhode Island.
They monitor their territory on horseback and in helicopters. They wear cowboy hats and business suits. They seek justice through court orders and by the pistols they keep holstered around their waists.
In the pilot episode, they carve up a mountainside with sticks of dynamite to stop a developer from accessing a river coursing through their property.
As John Dutton, the patriarch of the family, Kevin Costner embodies an American contradiction: You can take the frontiersman out of the Old West, but you can't take the Old West out of the frontiersman.
Created by Taylor Sheridan, Yellowstone is the latest play on the Western from a screenwriter and director who specialises in 21st-century twists on the genre.
His scripts for Sicario, Hell or High Water and Wind River, the latter of which he also directed, are all about lawmen and outlaws squaring off in an unsettled expanse, whether they're cartels infiltrating the Mexican border, bank robbers peeling through West Texas or government agents seeking a killer on an Indian reservation.
A Texas native who resides in Wyoming after a 15-year stay in Los Angeles, Sheridan is uniquely attuned to how Western values seep into the present, especially in the prairies he's called home.
While the Western, traditional or otherwise, has been left for dead by Hollywood movie studios, neo-Westerns such as Yellowstone are finding a home on television, which can better accommodate a niche genre than risk-averse blockbusters.
No matter whether these shows are set in the past, such as the Netflix limited series Godless, or the future, such as the HBO mind-bender Westworld, Western themes of identity, enterprise, power and violence are made newly relevant, shot through with the gun-toting brio that enthralled audiences in the genre's heyday.
Hector Escaton, played by Rodrigo Santoro, is a wanted criminal with a bounty on his head in Westworld. Photo / Supplied
"The overarching conflicts that Westerns have explored since the 30s still exist today in those regions," Sheridan said.
"You still have massive land developers doing everything they can to buy out ranches and develop them. You still have the consequences of settlement in that region to Native Americans. You have issues with government and oversight, and an influx of people into an area that continually change it. You have a small population that's trying very hard to resist change. All of those themes exist today, and they're worthy of exploration."
Sheridan wants Yellowstone — whose June 20 premiere earned a stellar 4.8 million viewers, counting DVR, in its first three days — to reflect a culture and a mindset that city dwellers have trouble fathoming.
He insists the show is apolitical, but it's insightful about life outside the reach of government, where neighbours rely on each other to solve problems — and, occasionally, settle explosive disputes. For the Duttons, that means defending their territory and administering justice, because no one else is around to do it.
Although Westerns are known to operate with the moral simplicity of Black Hats and White Hats, the current wave of TV neo-Westerns works in shades of grey.
Both Sheridan and Godless writer Scott Frank cite Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven as a touchstone for their shows, which are short on unambiguous heroes.
"Sometimes a person has to go back to the worst of themselves in order to do a good thing," Frank said, "and Unforgiven is a classic example ... Even the best of us are conflicted and tormented, and the Western is a natural vehicle for that."
Godless was conceived as a feature film in 2004, but even a genre wizard of Frank's calibre, with scripts such as Get Shorty and Minority Report to his credit, couldn't get it financed. He was told the Western "didn't travel" (do well overseas), and it wasn't until his producer, Steven Soderbergh, started experimenting in television, with the HBO biopic Beyond the Candelabra and Cinemax series The Knick, that he was encouraged to expand the idea into a Netflix series.
Godless embraces the tropes of both a rollicking 50s Western and the darkly philosophical anti-Westerns of the late 60s-early 70s, but with the feminist twist of an 1880s town run entirely by women widowed by a mine collapse.
After meeting so much resistance to his original movie script, Frank was surprised by how quickly the miniseries got the green light.
He said Netflix and other streaming services were "swallowing up genres that have been forgotten by movies, not just the Western, but any genre for adults. Movies are largely real estate now for superheroes or really broad comedies and action extravaganzas."
Jonathan Nolan, who co-created Westworld with his wife, Lisa Joy, says Westerns "are filled with transgression and sin and betrayal, because that's what we like to watch.
"And the question is why. Why is there so much commonality in the stories that we tell? What do they say about us? What do they say about the human condition, that we like these stories so much?"
Although some recent Western-themed films, such as Hell or High Water and this year's The Rider, opened to critical acclaim, television has the sprawl to give these questions serious consideration, and the flexibility to revive a genre that hasn't been commercially viable in theatres for years.
