(3 of 3)
Not that westerns must, or necessarily should, be historically precise. The Old West provides a mythic setting whose power is not dependent on its faithfulness to fact. Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman focuses on a female doctor (Jane Seymour) who moves to a Colorado town and adopts three orphaned children. Her weekly crusades for everything from environmental protection to gun control seem laughably anachronistic, but the show provides a bucolic backdrop for an exploration of social, ethical and family issues.
Lonesome Dove, by contrast, was perhaps the most realistic picture of the Old West TV has ever presented, its often shocking bursts of violence suffused with a lyrical stoicism. Return to Lonesome Dove, however, is less a sequel than a lazy recycling of scraps from older, blander westerns. Captain Woodrow Call (Jon Voight replacing Tommy Lee Jones) makes a second trek from Texas to | Montana, this time to drive a herd of horses, while his unacknowledged son (Rick Schroder) goes to work for a powerful cattle baron. In place of the hardscrabble poetry of the original is a meandering frontier soap opera, which lopes at a pace that could put tumbleweed to sleep.
What accounts for the western's resurgence? Industry watchers point to a general revival of interest in Western clothing and memorabilia, the boom in country music and the appeal of a rural life-style at a time when urban problems seem more oppressive than ever. The old-fashioned moral values of the frontier also seem especially inviting today. "In westerns," says CBS Entertainment chief Jeff Sagansky, "the bad guys are bad not because they were abused kids or temporarily insane. They are bad, and they meet their end. There's a catharsis the audience is allowed to feel that they don't get in society."
The western's long hiatus has also given the format new room to roam. Patricia Limerick, a professor at the University of Colorado and a leading revisionist historian, sees the end of the cold war as liberating. "We don't have to create an image and an ideology of ourselves as heroic expanders of the frontier and innocents who fight evil," she says. "All of that cold war fervor that drove the old westerns has lifted, so you can do more complex and interesting westerns." At a time when gritty urban realism and literal-minded docudramas hold sway, westerns are a refreshing departure. They provide escape, but also a chance to confront issues of universal significance and spiritual weight: a history lesson, but also a reminder of the imaginative power of myth and allegory. All that and a lot of pretty scenery too.