Being on the Taylor Sheridan beat can be as lonely as living on a sprawling acreage of empty prairie. For one, you have friends and colleagues who assume you’re turning into a wacko Libertarian, a Red State Republican, or that your taste is turning old and out of touch. And if you’re lucky, you might have one other person out there, maybe The Watch’s Chris Ryan, or your fellow Yellowstoners Podcast co-host, who understands your fascination— but not necessarily adoration—for a big sprawling, sometimes-connected Sheridan-verse that’s pitched somewhere in between made-for-CBS melodrama and classic Western ruggedness.
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Regardless of whether one comprehends your captivation with Sheridan’s work, often a quasi-nature vs. nurture statement about people being the product of their cruel and unforgiving environments, or his worldview— outsider-ish, don’t tread on me, independent, not as conservative as you think and much more disdain for establishment, etc.— as the Sheridan-verse and Taylor beat grows more expansively, it continues to yield diminishing returns and disappoint even as it grows in popularity, and attracts A-list actors like Harrison Ford.
And that is all to say that Sheridan’s new series, “Lawmen: Bass Reeves,” which was actually created by and showrun by Chad Feehan (“Ray Donovan,” “Banshee,” “Rectify”) but developed and produced by the bossman, is nearly devoid of intrigue or flavor, like more of the same meat and potatoes from the larger recycled Sheridan stew. It’s essentially just another showcase for rugged, taciturn men of few words who, actually, do love to soliloquy and enjoy the sound of their own voice despite the facade of what we’re meant to believe about them. Moreover, beyond feeling familiar and like eating bland leftovers and that same Western stoic tone, ‘Bass Reeves’ suffers from such an overabundance of reverence for its lead character it fails to make him or the show interesting. And it makes you miss the devious, complicated, mean, and sh*tty bastards of “Yellowstone,” to be honest, even if those melodramas often border on the ridiculous of late).
‘Bass Reeves’ purports to tell the “untold story” of the title character (David Oyelowo), one of the first Black U.S. Deputy Marshals west of the Mississippi, who rose out of enslavement, who lived through and survived the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the earliest cruel traces of Jim Crow-isms, to become a legendary lawman par excellence. And if that sounds a bit like a dull history lesson, that’s because it is. Yes, Reeves’ story is extraordinary, but by making him special, too— an exceptional man of the highest integrity, faith, family, uprightness, and compassionate morality without flaws—he ceases to be interesting (what’s more, his awoken sense of empathy feels way too modern and of today).
Other than one moment of fault—beating up a cruel white slavemaster for a cardgame betrayal—which in the scope of things feels more than justified—nearly every situation or scenario feels like a “teachable moment” of doing the right thing in complicated situations which usually fails at intriguing audiences.
‘Lawmen’ begins with Reeves’ story of enslavement, forced to fight for the Confederacy by his master George (Shea Whigham, the only one to really drop n-bombs throughout the series, as if to get them out of the way early and then pretend they were never used during this era ever again). In short order, he escapes to freedom— having to abandon his wife in the run-for-his-life process—finds refuge with various Native Indigenous people, learning their ways, reunites with his wife, and eventually becomes anointed a Deputy Marshall by Federal Judge Issac Parker (Donald Sutherland), impressed by his grit and gumption (“I need a man with a good gun and a straight spine,” he tells Reeves without a trace of irony or even a hint of having some fun with the line).
Along the way, Reeves becomes a scout to another lawman, Sherrill Lynn (Dennis Quaid), an irascible sonofabitch Deputy who enlists Reeves for work in “Indian Territory” since most white marshals are not welcome, and it’s venerable work here that gains him the rep leading to his Deputy lawman gig.
It’s perhaps a testament to the power of the Sheridanverse that it can wrangle so many stars for what are essentially one-off cameos that sometimes reoccur here and there—Whigham, Sutherland, Quaid, Barry Pepper as an unpredictable Confederate soldier, Garrett Hedlund as a self-interested posse man posing as something more high-minded, etc.—but none of them last very long and none of them can help make the boilerplate series feel interesting.
Directed by Christina Alexandra Voros (“Yellowstone,” “1883”) and Damian Marcano (“Snowfall”) and mainly written by Feehan, though with many collaborators on episodes like J. Todd Scott and Terence Anthony, Sheridan may have singlehandedly revived the Western on TV, and kudos for that, but ‘Reeves’ looks and feels largely indistinguishable from “1883,” “1923” and all these other great many spin-offs.
The samey somber opening theme and solemn title cards suggest the same qualities of the other Sheridan-verse shows: sweeping courage, honor, rugged people who toiled and endured much hardship so the next generation could live, fortitude and seriousness so grave it underscores just how humorlessness and joyless these shows have become (and ‘Bass Reeves’ does not have one lick of humor, levity or joy to it).
One of the central issues—and honesty, it this because it’s a show apologetically written by white people featuring black leads?— is just how righteous Bass Reeves is. “Out here, there are no laws, only outlaws,” one lawman tells Reeves, laying out the entirety of the show (and Wild Wild West) in one expository but pithy line of dialogue. But there is one honorable, super upstanding man out here, and it’s Reeves, seemingly utterly flawless, always empathetic, and in that sense, always unrealistic and hokey. Occasionally, what Sheridan shows lacks in wit and spark; they compensate with a soulfulness that can feel surprisingly stirring, but nothing of the sort arises here.
At every turn, no matter what, Reeves does the right thing and then some. When he wins a poker game amongst card sharks and angers them, he gives back the money in exchange for information. When a criminal tells him where the gang’s loot is—money he could use to feed his seemingly constantly exponentially growing family of five kids and a wife—he cites the oath he took. And when he’s tasked with tracking down a native outlaw— known as something of another bastard SOB— and the criminal catches on fire in a raid, it’s Reeves, in a great act of mercy, who puts him down despite Lynn’s protests that he “ain’t worth the bullet.”
While Reeves occasionally wrestles with the moral and spiritual cost the job has on his beloved family, it’s all pretty superficial, simplistic, and never complex. We haven’t even discussed how a show set in the late 1800s featuring a rare-bird Black sheriff is rarely about race in any meaningful way, other than the disdain all the white characters seem to place on the Native Indians of the story instead. ‘Lawmen’ could be subtitled, ‘Bass Reeves Always Stands Up For The Little Guy,” and while that’s nice and all, it makes for a dreadfully tedious show without any compelling drama.
A standalone anthology series, Paramount has already teased that “future iterations will follow,” following other Lawmen from this period, but the network honestly shouldn’t bother if they’re going to follow the formula of a dry history lesson that puts its lead character on a boring pedestal without meaningful conflict or drama. Ultimately, ‘Bass Reeves’ feels like an overly reverent and respectful show meant to honor this Western figure and do his legend right rather than tell morally complex stories. And hell, we’d settle for some engaging drama, entertaining shoot-outs, or something, but that would be asking too much of this cheerlessly well-behaved and loyal-to-its-character series. [C-]