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Westward growth has been mythologized onscreen for greater than a century—and its depiction has at all times been entwined with the politics and anxieties of the period. Within the 1939 movie “Stagecoach,” John Wayne crystallized our picture of the archetypal cowboy; a long time later, he performed one other memorable frontiersman in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” which questions how society is constructed. On this episode of Critics at Massive, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz hint the style from these cinematic classics to its current resurgence, marked by big-budget entries together with “American Primeval,” which depicts nineteenth-century territorial conflicts in brutal, unsparing element, and by the wild recognition of Taylor Sheridan’s “neo-Westerns,” which convey the time-honored kind to the fashionable day. Sheridan’s collection, specifically “Yellowstone” and “Landman,” usually middle on a world-weary patriarch tasked with defending land and property from outdoors forces ready to grab it. Typically described as “red-state reveals,” these works are intentionally slippery about their politics—however they pull in tens of millions of viewers from throughout the ideological spectrum. What accounts for this success? “Whether or not or not we wish to be residing in a Western,” Schwartz says, “we very a lot nonetheless are.”

Learn, watch, and hear with the critics:

“Yellowstone” (2018–24)
“Landman” (2024–)
“Horizon: An American Epic” (2024)
“American Primeval” (2025–)
“Stagecoach” (1939)
“Dances with Wolves” (1990)
“Physician Quinn, Medication Girl” (1993–98)
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little Home on the Prairie” collection
“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962)
“Shōgun” (2024)
“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948)
“Oppenheimer” (2023)

New episodes drop each Thursday. Observe Critics at Massive wherever you get your podcasts.

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