Westerns are en vogue, and the success of Yellowstone is not the only thing that shows this. The series has been running for five seasons, has spawned several spin-offs and got its star Kevin Costner to film his dream project Horizon.
A year before Yellowstone, another series prepared the ground for the renaissance of cowboy hats and revolvers. It has the promising title Godless and was created by Scott Frank, who later launched one of the big Netflix hits with the chess series The Queen’s Gambit.
Godless is about gangs of robbers and strong women in the Wild West
1884, in a small town in New Mexico: Most of the men of La Belle have died in a mining accident. Their wives, daughters and sisters were left behind to fight their way alone in the hostile and often lawless world of the West.
Then the outlaw Roy (Jack O’Connell) turns up injured on Alice’s (Michelle Dockery) ranch. Alice takes care of the young man, who has a dark past behind him. Roy belonged to the gang of the ruthless Frank (Jeff Daniels) and stole money from the murderer. Frank doesn’t let that go, which puts him on a collision course with the women of La Belle.
Netflix
Michelle Dockery plays one of the main roles in Godless
The cast also includes Thomas Brodie-Sangster as a deputy sheriff and Scoot McNairy as a sheriff who is slowly losing his eyesight. Merritt Wever plays his lesbian sister and gallops away with the series as a fierce western heroine who doesn’t let anyone tell her what to do.
The Netflix series is worth it for Western and Yellowstone fans
Although Godless is not a family saga, the 7-episode miniseries shares a few Similarities with modern Western YellowstoneHere, too, classic building blocks of the genre are reassembled to, for example, examine the role of women in a world that is usually presented to us from a male perspective.
Michelle Dockery’s rancher Alice could easily pass as the forgotten Dutton aunt in the Yellowstone family tree. Anyone who enjoys the complex ensemble of Yellowstone can look forward to equally good character development in Godless, which extends to the supporting characters.
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Fans of classic westerns will also get their money’s worth with all the experiments with the genre, as the series features vibrant landscape shots, an exciting spiral of violence, all kinds of moral gray areas and, of course, loaded revolvers. In about seven hours you can catch up on one of the best westerns on Netflix.
This is also reflected in the rating of the Moviepilot community: a whopping 7.9 points were given to the series, in which Scott Frank wrote and directed all episodes.