I Watch TV: Django

 

Django

A stranger rides into town on the night of the full moon, when they have revelries and delights. He wins a boxing match against the town champion, taking a purse of $100. This is a significant loss for the town, especially when combined with the losses on betting.

The town is New Babylon, in Texas in 1876. It’s run by John Ellis, a black man, and his fiancée Sarah, a white orphan. Ellis is supported by his sons (his first wife is deceased), and by a rag tag band of misfits and outcasts. They are opposed by Elizabeth, the daughter of the man who owned this land, and owned John Ellis, before the civil war. She’s the boss of Elmdale, the nearest town.

The stranger, who goes by Django, is looking for Sarah, his daughter. She’s been missing since a massacre in the chaotic aftermath of the civil war as Comanches raided and former soldiers took revenge. But Sarah doesn’t want him there, he abandoned her to go to war.

It’s a Western. It’s a Western about family and hidden pasts and old feuds. It attempts to draw in ideas from revisionist Westerns and historical Westerns and Old School Westerns, remixing and revisiting ideas from a whole stretch of the genre. For example the land that John Ellis was given for New Babylon is disputed, and turns out to be valuable. Usually this is because the railway is coming through, or it’s the only water source, or maybe gold or silver, but here it’s oil, a very modern preoccupation, though still period-appropriate.

The setpieces are spectacular, with the town of New Babylon built into a volcanic crater (in Romania) being a highlight. The reveal of secrets and histories is sometimes silly, information that characters are discussing and acting on being withheld from us, the audience, until they show us the flashback an episode or three down the line. The show does expect us to accept things, figure them out and catch up like we’re TV-literate adults, which I guess I approve of.

Watch This: Cool, violent, mysterious Western series
Don’t Watch This: It’s convoluted, cruel, remorseless and can’t quite live up to expectations