Elkhorn: The Greenhorn, on INSP

Before he could be a Rough Rider, he had to be a greenhorn. Teddy Roosevelt led such a storied life, his years as a cattleman in the Dakota Territory are often overlooked, but it was still a significant period for him. TR’s later service as New York City’s police chief made him an intriguing supporting character in The Alienist, but Roosevelt the rancher is the central protagonist of creator Craig Miller’s Elkhorn, which premieres Thursday on INSP.

The future president is not quite the garrulous “Bully! Bully!” Rough Rider yet. As the titular “Greenhorn” of the pilot episode, he has toughened himself up, but he still looks like a Northeastern intellectual, which he also was. Roosevelt’s fame as a wealthy progressive reformer proceeds him to the Dakota Territory, but many of the locals assume he will be easy to push around. However, they quickly learn he is made of stern stuff and has wisely chosen his associates.

Roosevelt partnered up with his former hunting guide, William Merrifield, who knows the terrain better than anyone. For his chief lieutenants, TR imported his friend, Bill Sewall, a brawny lumberjack from Maine and his nephew Wilmot Dow. They will form the nucleus of the Elkhorn ranch, protecting the herd from the Marquis de Mores, an unscrupulous French cattle baron.

At least that last part seems like a fair assumption from what we see in the pilot episode. So far, the Marquis is ostensibly polite, but he clearly rubs TR the wrong way. At this early stage, TR is more bedeviled by his own demons, including his grief over the death of his wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, and guilt from essentially abandoning their daughter, Alice Lee Roosevelt.

The English, on Prime

Our cousins in the UK love to sniff disapprovingly at the violence in America, but these Brits brought plenty of it across the pond. The native population bears the brunt of it, but they won’t spare anyone. Cornelia Locke is the exception. She only wants to kill a very specific fellow countryman, but she might have to cut down many more to get to him in writer-director Hugo Blick’s six-episode The English, which premieres tomorrow on Prime.

Instead of the man who shot her Pa, Locke is looking for the villain responsible for her son’s death, the circumstances of which will remain murky for the time-being. Unfortunately, it does not look like she will get far. Richard Watts, a racist saloon keeper and fellow British countrymen intends to kill Locke for the considerable cash she is carrying and then frame Eli Whipp, a former Pawnee U.S. Army scout he trussed up for being uppity.

Of course, a warrior like Whipp (that would be his assimilated name) is hard to kill. Rather reluctantly at first, he will ally himself with Locke. He can tell she has some bad business to conduct, so he would rather make his way to Nebraska, where he hopes to file a homesteading claim (which he could have legally, since he was no longer affiliated with a tribe). Yet, he and Locke can’t help saving each other from the various predators roaming the plains. David Melmont, the man Locke intends to kill is definitely one of them.

Melmont has generated a lot of bad karma, beyond Locke. He was one of the worst perpetrators of a notorious native massacre that still haunts the town of Hoxem, Wyoming. In fact, the atrocity indirectly poisoned nearly every character, in ways that will not be immediately obvious.

As revisionist westerns go, The English makes Heaven’s Gate look like a John Wayne crowd-pleaser. The tragic sweep of Blick’s story is quite powerful, but its relentless historical social criticism gets to be exhausting. The sins of the past just won’t stay buried, which is how it usually works. The first episode is also a darned good traditional western that could almost entirely standalone.

However, Brock gets bogged down in a number of extended flashbacks that greatly slow the momentum of the next two episodes. Locke and Whipp’s ambiguous relationship is the best thing about The English, but they disappear for long stretches of time.

Both Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer are terrific as Locke and Whipp. In fact, Whipp is such a richly complex character, whom Spencer does full justice to, The English could make the thesp (and his Morgan Freeman baritone) a household name. As usual, the always dependable Stephen Rea provides understated but memorable support as the decent Sheriff Robert Marshall.

TV’s Shane: E1-3

He is the cowboy most famous for leaving, but this short-lived TV series was all about him finding reasons to stay. This is sort of the Shane of Jack Schaefer’s novel and George Stevens’ classic film, but younger—and also somewhat more remorseful. It was far from a hit in 1966, but Shane lives on in reruns on getTV, where the first three episodes will soon be airing.

Shane was one of the deadliest gunslingers ever, but he accepted a position as a farm hand with the Starrett family. Obviously, the widowed Marian Starrett was another motivation, but it is her naïve son Joey who truly adores Shane. Wyoming cattle baron Rufe Ryker is not so enamored with the hired-gun turned hired-hand, but he probably understands Shane better than the Starretts. Nevertheless, Shane consistently sides against the old school cattleman in his campaign to chase out the recently arrived homesteading “sod-busters,” like the Starretts.

The battle turns particularly nasty in the first episode, “The Distant Bell,” in which Ryker does his best to sabotage the settlers plan to build a school in town. Naturally, he opposes anything that would build a sense of permanent community, but Shane believes the local kids deserve a chance to get the education he never had.

“Bell” is a good example of one Shane’s primary themes—the evolution of the frontier from a wild land of opportunity to more settled and regulated communities. In fact, the series is not wholly unsympathetic to Ryker (even though there it sometimes stokes suspicions he might have been complicit in the death of Starrett’s husband). Veteran character actor Burt Freed’s work as Ryker is consistently one of the best things about the series, starting right from the pilot.

The other major theme of Shane is the guilt the title character carries from the sins of his past. The conflicted Shane wants atonement, but it is still in his nature to keep moving, much like a shark. That inner turmoil is brought front-and-center in the second episode, “The Hant,” wherein the grieving father of a man Shane killed during the height of his gunslinging days starts haunting him, like a spirit. He is a sad ghost, rather than an angry one, nicely played by John Qualen, but that rather makes it worse for Shane.

Both themes converge in “The Wild Geese,” whose instinctive migration habits clearly serve as a metaphor for Shane’s own impulses. Once again, Ryker is hoping to drive out the Starretts, but this time it just might work. With no paycheck coming, Shane reluctantly agrees to sign up with an old associate hiring guns for range war in Canada, hoping to use his fee to shore up the struggling Starrett farm, but the widow Marian refuses to accept any blood money.

Shane episodes are moodier than typical TV oaters, but they usually build towards a legit western climax (the one in “Bell” is especially well executed). As Shane, the weirdly young-looking David Carradine is solid brooder and he already had respectable action chops. (Arguably, westerns were his second most identifiable genre after martial arts, with Kung Fu qualifying as both). He also has some ambiguously suggestive chemistry with Jill Ireland’s Marian Starrett (she was already seeing Charles Bronson at this point, so you can figure the strong, silent Shane was her type.)

Legend: the Complete Series—Hack Writers Can Be Heroes Too

Don Quixote is one hip novel. Cervantes forces his addled knight-errant to live up to reader expectations stemming from the previous sections published ten years early within his own narrative. It was meta and postmodern before meta and postmodern were cool. Nicodemus Legend is sort of the dime novel version—and proudly so. Pulp writer Ernest Pratt self-consciously modeled his western hero on himself, except he conspicuously lacked the virtues embodied by “the Knight of the Prairie.” However, with a little encouragement he starts to live up to his character’s heroic ideal in Legend: the Complete Series, now available on DVD from Mill Creek Entertainment.

Legend was part of the first wave of programming on the UPN network, which explains why it was so short-lived. It had decent a decent pedigree as the co-creation of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine producer Michael Piller, featuring the star of MacGyver. In fact, Pratt/Legend is sort of a cowardly, dissipated analog to Richard Dean Anderson’s ever-resourceful government agent. The only way Pratt ever carries a gun is between his thumb and fore-finger.

Although Pratt would prefer to stay half-crocked in a saloon, he is forced to travel to Sheridan, Colorado to clear his name in the two hour pilot. When he arrives, he receives a much warmer reception than he expected. Much to his confusion, the surrounding dirt-farmers believe he re-routed the local river, running it through their parched land instead of that of the local cattle baroness. Distinctly unamused, she has used her clout to trump up some rather embarrassing charges against him.

It turns out the man responsible is Janos Bartok, a Hungarian inventor inspired by Nikolai Tesla, who headed west after winning a pyrrhic legal victory against Edison. Reluctantly, Pratt will join forces with Bartok to protect the local immigrant Hungarian farming community. Pratt is a rather hedonistic dandy, but he has a heart—and Bartok has a real knack for dispensing guilt trips. Eventually, they strike a long term bargain. Bartok will serve as Pratt’s technical advisor, creating all sorts of steampunky gadgetry for his use, while Pratt will stay engaged with the people of Sheridan, trying to be the Legend-like hero they need and writing up the results in his first-person novels.

Like MacGyver, each remarkably consistent episode of Legend often ends with some form of conflict resolution or at least a bit of trickery that prevents bloodshed. Probably the best episodes include “Bone of Contention,” which suggests petroleum companies are not nearly as evil as Pratt had been led to expect, “Clueless in San Francisco,” featuring a fake séance and a brief but notable guest appearance by the great James Hong, and fittingly the final episode, “Skeletons in the Closet,” which starts with a weird uncredited cameo by Lara Flynn Boyle (completely at odds with the tone of the rest of the series), but concludes with a satisfying moment of shared comradery. Probably, the worst is “The Gospel According to Legend,” which seeks to score cheap points against Evangelicals and pharmaceutical companies, but at least it has Robert Englund doing his Elmer Gantry routine.

Maybe things would have been different if Legend had been on a different network (it certainly couldn’t have hurt). The show is actually quite pleasant to spend time with. Anderson and John de Lancie (Q in the Star Trek franchises) forge an endearing bickering buddy chemistry and Ken Harrison’s catchy theme is both nostalgic and contemporary sounding. The art-imitates-life-imitates-art meta-ness is generally rendered with a light touch. It is often clever and rarely forced. However, Jarrad (co-director of D Train) Paul’s shticky recurring work has not aged well, but let’s face it, any character named “Skeeter” is probably a mistake.

With its hot air balloons and mechanical buffalo, Legend is sort of like a Sunday school version of The Wild, Wild West. It means well and the directors (including Bob Balaban) keep it moving along at a good clip. Anderson and de Lancie are just hammy enough to mesh together nicely and the series projects a sense of optimism that compensates for its occasional lectures regarding manifest destiny’s manifest excesses. Frankly, you have to admire the ambition it takes to launch a retro genre-straddling western. Worth taking a look at, all twelve episodes of Legend are now available as a two-DVD set from Mill Creek Entertainment.