I binged watch the show this weekend and am curious what other people think.
I have a friend who said it was the best Western series ever and my parents liked it a lot.
I think it is absolutely watchable… but not at all good.
It’s cliched, tropey and outright dumb in certain places.
At times it seemed like a movie idea that got turned into a series, and at other times it seemed like they originally thought they had 13 episodes but it got caught down to 7.
The thing that was started out just amusing and then got frustratingly comical by the finale- Bad guy Frank Griffin’s self-regenerating “gang of 30 men”…it’s always about 30 men even though several are killed throughout the series and then in the finale a ton are killed in the shootout with the women in the hotel… but there’s still plenty left for Roy and Bill to shoot in the second shootout.
I think we’re on the same page…I saw a lot of raving about it, but while it was worth watching once I didn’t think it was that special. I remember commenting during the last episode that they must be out of bad guys already!
Far from the best western out there. Certainly no Lonesome Dove if we’re limiting the discussion to miniseries.
Interesting premise, story was OK if reach-y in places. If someone told me they were going to watch it I wouldn’t dissuade them, but I’m not going to run around around recommending it.
I was coincidentally reading Blood Meridian at the same time. Made for some interesting mashup dreams.
My husband and I really enjoyed watching “Godless”. It was fun to see Lady Mary from Downton Abbey play such an opposite role and fun to watch Jeff Daniels play a bad guy.
Enjoyed it but didn’t love it. I thought the performances were great, but the writing wasn’t. The biggest problem I had:
They spend several episodes setting up this town of black veterans as a nigh-unstoppable military force, if they could be roused… and then they’re almost all slaughtered in a few minutes by the gang with only a few losses. Totally unnecessary, IMO – we already knew Jeff Daniels was super-duper evil… we didn’t need to see a bunch of black families killed just to show this.
I couldn’t agree more. The show was beautiful to look at and most of the acting performances were terrific. It’s just that the story sucked. Also…
On top of the black town being wiped out, half of La Belle was destroyed too yet it was played as though it was a happy ending. And when the lone surviving black girl,
all of her family and townspeople murdered, shed a tear for Sam from Love Actually, I wanted to barf.
I enjoyed watching the series, but I will add that there were a number of times where the writing was so heavy handed or just plain ridiculous that you had to be willing to “look the other way” on occasion.
Examples:
The ghost indian who followed the Sheriff around. What purpose did that serve?
The slaughter of the Blacktown community.
The previously mentioned regenerating gang of 30 bad guys.
The amazing ability of bullets to always miss the key characters.
The gratuitous death of Whitey before the battle even began. That character deserved better.
There’s more, but it was still an enjoyable diversion for a short episode series. i did like the ending.
I enjoyed it, but it should have been better. The concept was interesting, and Daniels played a hell of a villain, but it was ham-handed in places. For example, the way-too-fashionable female gunfighter strolling through for the final showdown (had she ever shown any propensity for combat before?) took me out of the narrative - it just didn’t fit. So much of the staging - the final duel, the protagonist’s horsemanship, the themes of family and betrayal - had a lot of potential, but they just weren’t handled well. Did this series emerge from some sort of development hell, perhaps?