‘A moribund genre’

Although Westerns are known to operate with the moral simplicity of Black Hats and White Hats, the current wave of TV neoWesterns works in shades of gray. Both Sheridan and “Godless” writer Scott Frank cite Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” as a touchstone for their shows, which are short on unambiguous heroes.

“Sometimes a person has to go back to the worst of themselves in order to do a good thing,” Frank said. “And ‘Unforgiven’ is a classic example of that. Even the best of us are conflicted and tormented, and the Western is a natural vehicle for that.”

“Godless” was originally conceived as a feature film in 2004, but even a genre wizard of Frank’s caliber, with scripts such as “Get Shorty,” “Out of Sight” and “Minority Report” to his credit, couldn’t get it financed. Frank was told the Western “didn’t travel,” which means it doesn’t play well in the overseas market, and it wasn’t until his producer, Steven Soderbergh, started experimenting in television, with the HBO biopic “Beyond the Candelabra” and the Cinemax series “The Knick,” that he was encouraged to expand the concept into a 7 ½-hour series for Netflix.

With elements plucked from standards such as “Rio Bravo” and “Once Upon a Time in the West,” “Godless” embraces the tropes of both a rollicking 1950s Western and the darkly philosophical anti-Westerns of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but with the feminist twist of an 1880s mining town run entirely by women widowed by a silver-mine collapse. After meeting so much resistance to his original movie script, Frank was surprised by how quickly the miniseries got the green light.

“What’s happening with Netflix and the other streaming services,” Frank said, “is that they’re swallowing up a lot of genres that have been forgotten by movies — not just the Western, but any genre for adults. The movies are largely real estate now for superheroes or really broad comedies and action extravaganzas.”

Jonathan Nolan, who co-created “Westworld” with his wife, Lisa Joy, puts its more bluntly. “The Western is a moribund genre,” he said. “It’s one of those things like we’re seeing now with comic book movies: They’ve come and they will go at some point, in terms of (their) all-conquering popularity. In the ’40s and ’50s, in a movie theater or (on) TV, you were as often as not going to find a Western.”

In reimagining Michael Crichton’s 1973 sci-fi shoot-’em-up about an Old West theme park populated by malfunctioning robot “hosts” — a precursor of sorts to Crichton’s “Jurassic Park” — Nolan and Joy engage in the dark fantasy of wealthy guests in a lawless playground of sex and violence. But their focus on the hosts and their uncannily humanlike qualities bring the show to a point in Season 2 where they’re trying to find their own stake in an unsettled and perilous world, like synthetic pioneers.

For Nolan, the show has been a natural opportunity to examine the Western from the inside out. Westerns “are filled with transgression and sin and betrayal, because that’s what we like to watch. It’s a common thread of all of our stories. And the question is why.

Why is there so much commonality in the stories that we tell? What do they say about us? What do they say about the human condition, that we like these stories so much?”

Although some recent Western-themed films have opened to critical acclaim, television has the sprawl to give these questions some serious consideration, and the flexibility to revive a genre that hasn’t been commercially viable at the multiplexes for years.

The Western is dead. Long live the Western.