Prime Video’s 6-Part Western Series Is Perfect From Start To Finish

Although many viewers missed The English when it was first released in 2022, this acclaimed Western series deserves to be revisited as the miniseries is an exemplary addition to the genre. While the Neo-Western Justified updated the genre’s conventions for a 21st-century setting, traditional period piece Westerns still have a hard time winning over viewers on the small screen.

Between Dark Winds, Tulsa King, and Landman, there is no shortage of Neo-Western hits that bring the genre’s old tropes to new settings. However, straightforward traditional Western shows like Lawman: Bass Reeves, Netflix’s masterpiece Godless, American Primeval, and The Abandons tend to have a tougher time winning over viewers and critics.

Prime Video’s The English Is A Must-Watch Western Miniseries

Since these shows rarely last more than one season, The English’s most ingenious move was telling its entire story in one self-contained outing. Starring Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer, The English is a Western period piece set in the 1890s in Kansas. The series sees Emily Blunt’s Lady Cordelia Locke arrive in America to avenge her son’s murder.

Cordelia soon comes across Spencer’s Sergeant Eli Whipp, a conflicted member of the Pawnee Nation who is en route to Nebraska. Spencer’s character plans to claim land that the army owes him for his service, although he knows that the government is unlikely to honor their debt. Cordelia realizes their two quests are interlinked, and the pair start working together.

What follows is a visually stunning, perfectly paced Western story that subverts the genre’s tropes as much as it plays into them. The English may not be right for fans of Taylor Sheridan’s many Western shows , as the series isn’t a crowd-pleasing amalgamation of the genre’s most satisfying conventions. Instead, it is a morally complex story that calls to mind a specific Western era.

The English Revived An Under-appreciated Western Sub-Genre

Throughout the ‘70s, Revisionist Westerns offered viewers a dirtier, more complex, and more morally ambiguous take on the genre’s well-worn tropes. Instead of reinforcing values like American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, these gritty, intelligent Westerns subverted the expectations that audiences brought to the genre. Iconic movies like Once Upon a Time in the West and The Wild Bunch helped reshape the Western.

In the years that followed, movies like McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Jeremiah Johnson, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid deconstructed the patriotic America of earlier Westerns, paving the way for later critical hits like Tombstone, Unforgiven, and The Power of the Dog. Thoughtful and uncompromising, this new breed of Western questioned the genre’s racist history.

Heavily inspired by The Babadook director Jennifer Kent’s underrated 2018 Western The Nightingale, The English’s story of revenge and justice borrows from the revisionist Western’s long history to offer a new view on the familiar genre. It is this approach that makes the series unmissable.

While too many Western shows barely acknowledged the existence of indigenous Americans or portrayed them only as villains, The English offers a more thoughtful portrayal of a native protagonist in Spencer’s Whipp. Meanwhile, Blunt’s standout central turn allows The English to become a rare Western series with a female lead character.