June 26th - Godless (2017)

4/5

This is a tricky one to rate! A good show with excellent acting, cinematography, and music, but there's parts of it that don't sit right with me. Between the racism (I'll get to that) and the awful marketing of being about a town full of women, then focusing on a bunch of men, it definitely leaves a lot to be desired from the writing room.

However, with the knowledge of what to actually expect in mind, I was able to enjoy the story the show did tell. My experience with westerns up to this point has been hating John Wayne movies and loving spaghettis, so this was a hard shift from both of those. I love dramas starring ensemble casts with intertwining stories, and I think being a miniseries really allowed enough time to be spent on each character without feeling bloated. It was an interesting choice to go back and forth with the complex portrayal of Frank Griffin. Frankly, I have little interest in humanizing a man whos introductory scenes involve assault, but it did add depth to Roy Goode's character, who had been Frank's foster son up until very recently before the events of the show. I don't think he'd be such a sympathetic protagonist otherwise. The women of La Belle are unfortunately flat, and the one gay romance gets a cheating plotline that I'm frankly tired of seeing played out.

Unfortunately, the show's portrayal of Black and Indigenous characters is pretty shitty. While violence is ever present from almost all the characters, the white ones use firearms and are relatively detatched from the violence they are committing, compared to the scene where a Black man beats and humiliates his daughter for kissing a white boy. Then, of the three instances of rape referenced/depicted in the show, the most graphic was the assault of a white woman by several ambiguous Indigenous men. I frankly don't care if these are "historically accurate" details, when several of the brutal acts of violence from the white characters occur off screen and are only implied. Theb, the ones that are on screen include the slaughter of the local Black community in their entirety.

Additionally, the characters of color portrayed in a positive fashion get less depth and screentime than their white counterparts. Iyovi gets very little screentime, and half her dialogue isn't subtitled beyond "speaks Paiute", and Louise gets no narrative beyond being Whitey's love interest. Truckee is the only one who gets a character arc and we don't really get to see any conclusion to that, and his story was used primarily to compare to Roy's childhood with Frank. I love Truckee, but this could have been handled with far more tact.

Overall I really enjoyed the show and had a great time with it, but would've liked for some more development on the non-white non-men characters.