Random kid at basketball tournament: I get to be Zack Morris!
Another random kid: Fine, then I’m the Cryptkeeper!
9-year-old Matt: I want to be Gus McCrae!
(awkward silence)
Lonesome Dove has a long tail of prestige in the Roberson household, far longer than one would expect given how many damned Westerns my family has watched over the ensuing decades. It remained in the familial consciousness despite the endless Eastwoods and John Waynes and the annual bromide that the genre is dead. (“The Western is dead” is one of those worthless takes that people internalize, as it requires one to ignore the zillion Western TV shows and the zillion revisionist Western films of varying quality. For my money, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is just as essential within the genre as anything made by John Ford or Howard Hawks.)
One factor in Lonesome Dove’s longevity is that was released during a time when a prestige TV miniseries was seen by a shitload of people: 26 million households saw Lonesome Dove, according to Nielsen. And our house didn’t have satellite or cable until about 1998, which meant that when we watched our TV, we were watching one of the major networks or a VHS tape. So it was impossible to miss something like Lonesome Dove. Another factor is that the novel is amazing and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which are both rarities in the Western genre and certainly engendered some excitement, especially among bookworms like my dad and me. I can attest to the quality of the novel both by having read it several times and by having read countless total garbo pulp Western trash as a kid that pales in comparison to Larry McMurtry’s masterpiece. Yet another factor is that the producers swung for the danged fences with casting, with the movie featuring Robert Duvall, Diane Lane, Tommy Lee Jones, Frederick Forrest, Anjelica Huston, Danny Glover, Chris Cooper, Glenn Headly…
But the ultimate reason for it sticking with me, even though I’ve not seen it since the 90s? It has a perfect structure, one that future prestige TV will adopt: it is serialized around a basic premise, and various melodramas are created by characters entering and leaving the main narrative. And the characters grow and relationships change over the course of the journey. Most (and I really mean all) Western TV was just procedurals and adventures featuring static characters. Marshall Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke caught cattle rustlers and riverboat gamblers for 20 years without much changing beyond his waistline. Them Cartwright boys on Bonanza got older (and older and older), forcing creative solutions across 400 episodes, but that was a necessity, not a creative decision,.
But Lonesome Dove had a story to tell that was more than just “frontier marshal fights villain of the week.” Try this on for size, and think about the premises of Deadwood and Mad Men and Breaking Bad. The Hat Creek Cattle Company, run by old Texas Rangers August McCrae and Woodrow Call, are sick of their dead end Texas town, and decide to drive their cattle to the lush fields of Montana. They are joined by ladies man, former compatriot, and general shitheel Jake Spoon, who shot a man in Arkansas and is on the lam. Jake is being chased by July Johnson, a lawman with a bitter wife and a neverending stream of problems (played to dyspeptic perfection by Chris Cooper). Jake sweet talks a local sex worker into joining the cattle drive, which also includes other former Rangers and Call’s illegitimate son, a badly kept secret around town. As they head north, they encounter marauders, lost loves, frontier justice, general disasters, tragic deaths, and sneaky betrayals. Some of them make it to Montana but we are left wondering if it was worth the cost.
THIS IS GOOD STUFF, I’m telling ya. Did you see the part above where I talked about the cast including Chris Cooper, Tommy Lee Jones, Diane Lane, and Anjelica Huston?
Lonesome Dove was one of those prized home video recordings for us. We had it on a tape with one or two other movies (a continuing regret for this series is that I can’t recall what else was on each of these tapes), and I’m fairly confident that I watched the entire miniseries no less than 10 times over the period from 1989 to 1995.
It was a different time, being in West Virginia in the 80s. The isolation from the outside world was palpable. And on top of that, my parents’ generation and the one before it watched a lot of Westerns on TV, and I was country to my core. My wife has been astonished repeatedly by my lack of knowledge of some well-known song or TV show from the era, but my usual defense is that I basically listened to only country music and contemporary christian music (other than, strangely, Paul Abdul and Whitney Houston), and watched almost no cable TV until I was in high school. I wore a squirrel’s tail attached to my baseball cap when I went to elementary school. My tacklebox, like my book and movie collections now, was carefully sorted. I owned a muzzleloader before I had my first meal at a Mexican restaurant. I don’t want to imply negativity about these facts; I am simply showing context for how a kid could latch onto something like Lonesome Dove as part of my identity when people living even 40 miles away were watching MTV and going to arcades and doing the stuff that I see on We Love the 80s and other retrospectives.
That country boy / Western identity would continue on for me for a couple of years after 1989, but a steady diet of science fiction books and a fervent need to see the outside world meant that it would never last. Movies like Pulp Fiction and As Good As It Gets were not the first or the hundredth piece of art to push me out of West Virginia, but how do you expect to keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Mia Wallace?
Other 1989 Candidates: Steel Magnolias; Batman; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; Back to the Future Part II; Lethal Weapon 2; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; Ghostbusters 2; The Little Mermaid; Who’s Harry Crumb?; Major League; Turner & Hooch; National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.