Westward expansion has been mythologized onscreen for more than a century—and its depiction has always been entwined with the politics and anxieties of the era. In the 1939 film “Stagecoach,” John Wayne crystallized our image of the archetypal cowboy; decades later, he played another memorable frontiersman in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” which questions how society is constructed. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace the genre from these cinematic classics to its recent resurgence, marked by big-budget entries including “American Primeval,” which depicts nineteenth-century territorial conflicts in brutal, unsparing detail, and by the wild popularity of Taylor Sheridan’s “neo-Westerns,” which bring the time-honored form to the modern day. Sheridan’s series, namely “Yellowstone” and “Landman,” often center on a world-weary patriarch tasked with protecting land and property from outside forces waiting to seize it. Sometimes described as “red-state shows,” these works are deliberately slippery about their politics—but they pull in millions of viewers from across the ideological spectrum. What accounts for this success? “Whether or not we want to be living in a Western,” Schwartz says, “we very much still are.”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“Yellowstone” (2018–24)
“Landman” (2024—)
“Horizon: An American Epic” (2024)
“American Primeval” (2025—)
“Stagecoach” (1939)
“Dances with Wolves” (1990)
“Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman” (1993–98)
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” series
“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962)
“Shōgun” (2024)
“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948)
“Oppenheimer” (2023)
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