Lone Gunman

Elmore Leonard's new series Justified brings an old-school western archetype into the 21st century

Prashant Gupta / FX

Timothy Olyphant's U.S. Marshal updates his Deadwood sheriff.

It seems like TV networks have been talking about remaking the western for longer than they actually made them. Maybe the genre, which dominated TV drama in the '50s and '60s, is just too much of its time to thrive in a more gray-hatted era. HBO aired three seasons of Deadwood , a dark and poetic look at the Darwinian life of a mining camp, but that was less a remake than a rebuttal.

TV has taken stabs at making westernish series, however. The excellent but short-lived Firefly , for instance, was essentially a western set in space. And now, with...

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