Binging ‘American Primeval?’ Here Are 10 More Westerns for You to Watch Next
With today’s release of the new Western series American Primeval, set during the gritty exploration of the birth of the American West and showcasing the resulting violence and drama it inspired, we thought it might be a good idea to assemble a list of other compelling Western drama series you can watch once you’ve binged this Netflix hit — which might be soon, as it is only six episodes. But don’t worry, as there are plenty more where that came from.
Check out this list of some of the most memorable fictional cowboys and outlaws of the 20th century.
Remind 
Yellowstone
Obviously, if you haven’t watched any of the shows created by Taylor Sheridan, that should be your first stop. Sheridan is the new unofficial king of Westerns, and this five-season massive hit starring Kevin Costner was his first big success.
Costner plays widower John Dutton, proprietor of the modern-day Yellowstone Dutton Ranch, his family’s Rhode Island-sized Montana sprawl of big business, modern technology and Wild West skill sets. Invulnerable to outside forces for generations, the estate’s prime location in the shadow of Yellowstone National Park now renders it a target for land developers, oil and logging corporations, the neighboring Indian reservation, and locals who feel that the Duttons’ interests have usurped their own progress. Sheridan, who grew up on ranches himself, described the series as a sort of modernized Bonanza or “The Great Gatsby on the largest ranch in Montana.”
1883
This prequel to the Kevin Costner-led hit presents an origin story for how the Duttons first settled in Montana. The series follows the Dutton family in the 19th century as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of untamed America. It is a stark retelling of Western expansion, and an intense study of one family fleeing poverty to seek a better future.
1883 stars Sam Elliott as Shea Brennan, a tough-as-nails cowboy with immense sadness in his past, who has the herculean task of guiding a group from Texas to Montana, and who does not suffer fools. Real-life spouses Faith Hill and Tim McGraw portray James and Margaret Dutton, patriarch and matriarch of the Dutton family. Billy Bob Thornton and Isabel May also star.
1923
Another spinoff of Yellowstone, this series goes back in time to the early twentieth century. Led by A-listers Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford, the drama focuses on the Dutton family’s next two generations following 1883 as they struggle to survive a historic drought, Prohibition and an epidemic of cattle theft, all battled beneath the cloud of Montana’s great depression, which preceded the nation’s economic downturn by almost a decade. Season 2 will begin streaming in February on Paramount+.
(If you can’t wait, and want even more Taylor Sheridan, check out the neo-Western 2016 film Hell or High Water. You won’t be disappointed!)
Justified
In this 2010-15 FX series inspired by the pages of crime-novelist extraordinaire Elmore Leonard, Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) is a no-nonsense U.S. Marshal who returns to his native Kentucky to fight crime. Givens must go up against a buddy from his youth, Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), who has resurfaced as a violent white-power leader.
Who doesn’t love Walton Goggins?
Deadwood
Before Timothy Olyphant was Raylan Givens on Justified, he was Seth Bullock on another Western hit set in the late 1800s. A gritty Western set in a lawless gold-mining town in 1876 South Dakota, just weeks after Custer’s massacre at nearby Little Big Horn, Deadwood stars Timothy Olyphant, Ian McShane and Keith Carradine among an ensemble cast of both fictional and historical characters. Carradine carries a larger-than-life screen presence befitting legendary gunman Wild Bill Hickok, but history warns us he’s not in it for the long haul. That leaves the tension between Olyphant’s honorable marshal-turned-businessman Seth Bullock and McShane’s black-hearted brothel and saloon owner Al Swearengen as the series’ true grit — and as adversaries, the mismatched pair breathe life into Deadwood.
Gunsmoke
Marshal Matt Dillon (James Arness) tries to prevent lawlessness from overtaking Dodge City, Kansas, in this long-running Western TV series, which ran for twenty seasons.
Godless
This Netflix show really took the phrase “no man’s land” to heart. Set in 1884, the Western miniseries features a young outlaw on the run from his vengeful mentor who winds up in a small New Mexico town populated almost entirely by women. Watch it if only to see Michelle Dockery‘s transformation from a fancy lady aristocrat of Downton Abbey to a gun-toting widow of the Wild West.
The Rifleman
This 1958-63 Western television series starred Chuck Connors as rancher Lucas McCain, a widower who raises a son while battling dangerous desperados in New Mexico. It was set in the 1880s in the fictional town of North Fork, and was one of the first primetime series on US television to show a single parent raising a child.
Lonesome Dove
Old friends Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call, along with a ragtag group of ranch hands, leave the Rio Grande Valley on a cattle drive to Montana, encountering outlaws, Native Americans and old flames along the way in this 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Larry McMurtry that spawned an equally successful TV series in 1989. McMurtry is perhaps the most well-regarded author of the genre; he also penned several other follow-up novels in the 1990s, all of which ended up onscreen as well: Streets of Laredo, Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon.
Hell on Wheels
This period drama is set in the traveling den of sin and iniquity — and churches — that accompanied the westward march of the Union Pacific Railroad, starting in Nebraska in the years just after the Civil War (the series actually filmed in Alberta, Canada).
Anson Mount stars as former Confederate soldier Cullen Bohannon, who’s on a mission to exact revenge on the Union soldiers who murdered his wife.
Also starring are Colm Meaney as Thomas “Doc” Durant, inspired by a real person, a businessman and investor who plans to make his fortune from the railroad; rapper Common as recently freed slave Elam Ferguson, seeking to find a place in the world; Dominique McElligott as Lily Bell, the recent widow of a railroad surveyor; and Eddie Spears as Native American Joseph Black Moon.