Without any Star Trek to entice me, I’ve found myself looking at the Paramount+ app less and less. Yes, I’ve been watching the Frasier reboot these last ten weeks or so. But now even that’s over.
Diving into the rest of the app, I’ve noticed — and not for the first time — exactly how much the Yellowstone universe has expanded. There look to be a total of seven shows in production including the original. They span a period of time from the mid-19th century until the present day. It’s an interesting experiment to see how much people will invest in this sort of thing.
The series that caught my eye, and inspired this article, is 1883. It makes me wonder how much people will connect with Westerns in 2024 and why this particular art form seems to survive.
Westerns are a myth.
Let’s get this out there once and for all. “The Old West,” if it did exist, didn’t last long. It certainly wasn’t where you think it was. Most of what we call “the Old West” is actually the middle of the US today, since the West Coast was really remote before railroads came into play.
The myths and stories of the Old West, from marshals to lawless towns to wagon trains, are largely made up. I’m not saying these things didn’t exist. I’m saying they were nowhere near as common as you would think by looking at popular culture. Wagon trains were the first wave of settlement, yes, but they were only for the brave (and stupid.) Far more often than not, they ended with everyone involved dying. Seriously, if you’re an elder millennial, and you played The Oregon Trail as a kid, it really was like that. A lot of people died of dysentery.
Lawless towns? Yes, I’m sure they existed. But sociologically speaking, most very small societies work very well because they are too small for anyone to really rise to criminal activity. In a group of 500 settlers, everyone would know who was stealing from who and it wouldn’t last long. Most frontier towns were full of quiet folks who were doing everything they could to brave the elements. They weren’t full of well-meaning prostitutes, mean drunks, or roving marshals.
So why do we think they were like that?
That’s simple: television and movies. In the first half of the 20th century, Westerns were popular. Keep in mind that for a lot of that time, people remembered the late 19th century. It was sort of like setting a film in the 1970s today. Not only that, it was easy to film Westerns because a lot of stuff was made in Southern California. There was a lot of westerny looking area, and it didn’t rain a lot so you could shoot outside.
As for the overall character of the western, it’s a morality play and a particularly American one. Westerns celebrate self-reliance, grit, and steadfastness. These were all very big 19th century values in reality, and they’re certainly obvious in Westerns. There’s something very romantic about someone making it all on their own despite incredible odds.
The reality
Here’s the reality of life in the “old west” in the 19th century. It wasn’t dramatic. It was a day-to-day battle to make sure you had enough food and avoid infectious diseases. It wasn’t a great time to be a woman, because your options were quite limited. It was an even worse time to be a child, because you were expected to work from dawn to dusk from the time you were about 5 years old. And if you were a person of color forget it.
And, it was a specifically bad time to be over 40. There was nothing even resembling healthcare as we know it today, especially in remote towns. Pain management basically consisted of drinking a lot. People in the old west didn’t live lives of quiet nobility. They lived short, brutish lives that usually ended with them dying of infection.
But of course that wouldn’t make good television.
Can Westerns even resonate today?
Much like movies about medieval times, today’s Westerns are nothing more than fantasy shows. They aren’t about anything resembling real life. And that’s why they last. Westerns are compelling dreams that anyone can buy into. Unlike real life, the good guy always wins. There’s no need for subtlety at the end of a Colt .45.
I don’t know if Paramount+ will turn into the all-Western network in the coming months while I’m waiting for another Star Trek show. All I can say is it wouldn’t surprise me.
