15 Best Western TV Pilots Of All Time, Ranked – TVLine

The Western is one of the most oversaturated, predictable, and aesthetically exhausted genres on television, and it has been for the majority of the medium’s existence. Any network or producer who wants to make a new show in this space has one episode to prove why they’re different from 70 years of cowboy capers — these 15 TV pilots do exactly that.

They aren’t all straightforward Westerns. In the prestige era, when even the best of the genre was struggling, some writers combined the Western with another genre — science fiction, crime, horror — to give it new life. Whether their gunslingers were fighting zombies or aliens, however, these projects were always intended to be part of the grand tradition of the TV Western.

“The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.” is an odd show. It only lasted for a single season on Fox, and, admittedly, probably shouldn’t be included on any “Best Western series” lists that aren’t exclusively considering pilot episodes — mostly because it goes off the rails the further it gets into its baffling sci-fi subplot. In its first episode, however, it mostly restricts itself to its real selling point — Bruce Campbell playing a cowboy with the demeanor of Indiana Jones.

Co-created by Jeffrey Boam (“The Last Crusade”) and Carlton Cuse (“Lost”), the series stars Campbell as the titular adventurer, whose personality and charisma largely carry the plot. Brisco is cunning, sarcastic, roguish and blunt in a way that amusingly undercuts what you’d expect from a Western protagonist. He isn’t the guy who takes out a town full of outlaws — he just ducks long enough for them to shoot each other. The pilot is worth watching for his performance alone, and, as a bonus, you get a sense of one of the stranger forgotten TV shows to come out of the ’90s.

The original “Star Wars” films had plenty of Western influences, but it wasn’t until “The Mandalorian” that those influences became explicit enough for the franchise to stake a genuine claim to the genre. The pilot episode makes this intention very clear.

“Chapter 1: The Mandalorian” was written by series creator Jon Favreau, who previously ventured into sci-fi-Western territory with the 2011 film “Cowboys & Aliens.” The genre meld works much better here, with Favreau making his protagonist a perpetually helmeted bounty hunter who rarely speaks. Pedro Pascal, the man behind the Mandalorian armor, appropriately likened his character to those played by Clint Eastwood — a mysterious man with a cold, dispassionate talent for violence, whose personal code of honor makes room for shooting first and asking questions later.

This episode is also notable for its gorgeously cinematic visual style (thanks to cinematographer Greig Fraser of “Dune” fame, which sells the first live-action “Star Wars” series as something between prestige television and blockbuster entertainment) and its striking orchestrations (from Academy Award-winning composer Ludwig Göransson). It also introduces the character of Grogu, then known as “Baby Yoda,” who quickly became one of the most popular “Star Wars” characters of all time.

“Daybreak” isn’t regularly cited as one of the best “Yellowstone” episodes overall. It is, however, the single pilot on this list responsible for making the Western genre dominant again in the landscape of American television.

Taylor Sheridan wrote and directed every episode of the first season, the pilot included. Ironically, having total control over both aspects of the season granted Sheridan two diametrically opposite advantages you can already start to feel in the pilot. A show with one writer has a clear, unified intent that not only remains consistent episode to episode, but seamlessly marries plot and theme; a show with one director is allowed to evolve episode to episode, visually speaking, without having to constantly look back to the language of the pilot — Sheridan is free to make shot choices as the story demands, right from the brutal first scene.

The episode deliberately balances brutality and beauty throughout its extraordinary 92-minute runtime. Sheridan crafts a world where the elegiac grandeur of the American West is as timeless as the bloody conflicts that founded it. This tension runs under every scene until the shocking death of Lee Dutton (Dave Annable), an immediate inflection point that proved no one in this world was safe.

For as much as spirituality, redemption and justice play their roles as recurring themes of the Western genre, it’s hard to find a show that confronts them all in as fresh a way as “Preacher.” Based on the Vertigo comic book series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, the AMC series follows the path of Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), a morally and spiritually ambivalent preacher who gains the supernatural power to control anyone with a spoken command.

The pilot episode is able to establish this and multiple other wild, disarming storylines without losing the Southern Gothic, Western appeal that makes “Preacher” immersive. This world credibly holds wandering angels and horrifying religious miracles alongside normal, believable Texans and small-town grifters — all within its first hour. (Its two action set pieces are a barroom brawl over a misunderstood kink and an airplane vampire massacre at 20,000 feet.) Cooper is a pitch-perfect Western hero, his character simultaneously ashamed of and attracted to violence in a manner that feels psychologically compelling rather than internally contradictory.

The first season of HBO’s “Westworld” was all about subverting audience expectations, something the pilot made abundantly clear from the start. Where Michael Crichton’s original film explored the horror that a park made of robots might inflict on humanity, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s adaptation explored what horrible impulses humanity might exercise if given a playground of robots.

This is elegantly displayed in the opening sequence, wherein the audience realizes its initial POV character, Teddy (the ruggedly dashing, heroic-looking cowboy played by James Marsden), is nothing more than a powerless drone to be slaughtered by guests like “The Man in Black” (Ed Harris). There are few ways to start a series that could be more upsetting or alienating to a potential viewer — here, however, the choice perfectly catalyzes a kind of challenged and inverted empathy that the rest of the season is built on.

“The Original” is unique on this list specifically for using the tropes and aesthetics of the Western genre in an explicitly presentational form, as an exploration and critique of what they speak to in the human spirit. It’s one of the most effective examples of genre deconstruction in the 21st century.

Over a decade before the release of his seminal revisionist Western “The Wild Bunch,” Sam Peckinpah attempted to pitch a script for an episode of the popular Western series “Gunsmoke.” It was rejected by producers — a likely upsetting setback that led to an entirely new series.

That spec script ultimately became “The Sharpshooter,” the pilot episode for the underrated ABC series “The Rifleman.” The show ran on the network for five seasons, and not a single one of them is bad.The premiere introduces audiences to Chuck Connors’ Lucas McCain, a Civil War veteran trying to use his skills as a marksman to buy a home for himself and his son, Mark (Johnny Crawford). Lucas being a single parent and widower was groundbreaking at the time, with some outlets citing it as the first example of a trope that would go on to recur in the Western genre at large. Also worth noting is the episode’s young guest star — a 21-year-old Dennis Hopper.

AMC built its peak 2000s-2010s reputation by subtly tapping into American audiences’ starved appetites for good Western TV shows. “The Walking Dead” did so by using the genre’s language, visual presentation and tropes to give new texture to the zombie story.

The first episode stays close to the first issues of the Image Comics series by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard. Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes is introduced to us as the quintessential Western lawman, later contextualized as a lonesome survivor searching on horseback for any sign of humanity. Writer-director Frank Darabont (who also served as the series’ initial showrunner) compared Lincoln’s performance to Gary Cooper’s, the actor withholding just enough from the audience to keep them invested. He’s the “strong, silent type” a certain mobster used to wonder about, forced to contend with horrors that will either crack his stoic demeanor or turn it into an inhuman shell. That inner-conflict is layered into the storytelling immediately. Adding to the Western, cinematic feel is Darabont and cinematographer David Tattersall’s decision to film the pilot on beautifully tactile 16mm film stock.

The “Kung Fu” pilot would be significantly higher on this list if it weren’t for the elephant in the room. The series aimed to make genuine headway in representation in the Western genre, which had historically used Asian and other non-white characters as villains or victims. In the first episode, “Kung Fu” introduces American audiences to the first Asian Western hero they’d ever seen — who was, disappointingly, played by the very white David Carradine. It’s a casting choice that’s not only offensive, but undermining of the entire endeavor.

It’s a real shame, considering how great the premise and story are. The feature-length pilot uses two interwoven timelines to explore the backstory of Carradine’s Kwai Chang Caine, a Chinese-American martial arts master who was raised in a monastery during the Qing dynasty. When he kills a member of the imperial family, he is forced to seek refuge in America. The pilot moves between Caine’s training and his present, drifting life in a way that makes the episode work as a satisfying self-contained TV movie.

Before Emmy-chasing became the go-to strategy for every film actor scared of tights and capes, Barbara Stanwyck proved that big-screen gravitas could translate to the small screen without being diminished. The “Double Indemnity” star anchored “The Big Valley,” an entry in the foundational “rich ranch family drama” sub-subgenre that traces back to “Bonanza,” exploded with “Dallas” in the ’80s and continues to expand through Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone” universe. “The Big Valley” still stands out for boldly centering its family around Stanwyck’s widowed matriarch Victoria Barkley.

More subversive yet is the introduction of Heath (Lee Majors, future star of “The Fall Guy”), an outsider who arrives at the Barkley ranch accusing Victoria’s late husband of infidelity — he claims to be a member of the Barkley family by blood. Right away, “The Big Valley” differentiates itself meaningfully from “Bonanza,” challenging both the characters and the audience to interrogate character tropes they might have taken for granted. For her performance in the series, Stanwyck was nominated for three Emmy Awards, winning one in 1966.

On a list of the best TV pilots of all time, the first episode of “Breaking Bad” would be at the top easily. It is the perfect model of prestige episodic storytelling on just about every level — structure, pacing, character development, world-building, you name it. It’s the sort of episode you make aspiring writers and directors study, regardless of your opinions of the rest of the series.

In terms of its place in the Western genre, the contemporary setting, the deconstruction of Western themes of masculinity and individualism, and the injection of crime thriller elements make “Breaking Bad” an exemplar of the neo-Western. As brilliant as Vince Gilligan’s “Scarface”-inspired pitch was, the series has much more in common (visually, psychologically and morally) with the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men.” And when financial constraints forced production to move from California to the series’ now-iconic locale of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Gilligan rejoiced because the naturally cinematic landscape evoked his favorite Westerns. There’s no question it fits in this genre — the gold rush just happens to be blue.

One of the most overlooked Western series today, “Wagon Train” was notable for focusing on the journey rather than the destination. The West is both the setting and the dream motivating each episode, an idea that had to be established alongside the series’ anthology-like structure. Though the core cast (anchored by frequent John Ford collaborator Ward Bond) remains the same, every installment is shaped by a new guest star’s story.

For the pilot, the series hired Academy Award-winning actor Ernest Borgnine. He played Willy Moran, a troubled former boxer struggling with alcoholism, who drove one of the wagons. This episode audaciously sets out to tell the story of a one-off guest star while introducing the rest of its cast and its major ideas — and it completely works. A robbery attempt ensues, and it creates plenty of opportunity to flesh out the ensemble, as well as the thrilling potential for danger uniquely faced by the train, while selling the concept of the “hero of the week” format.

Interestingly, the intended pilot of the mythically mishandled and ill-marketed “Firefly” was aired last in the series’ order by Fox. Viewers tuning in for the first episode were treated to “The Train Job,” a fine episode that was used by the network to render “Serenity” as late-stage, flashback lore rather than the logical foundation of this universe. “Serenity” is also the episode that most effectively establishes “Firefly” as a true space Western.

“Serenity” goes beyond remixing aesthetics and tropes and digs deep into the setting of “Firefly,” which is an explicit analogue to the post-Civil War era that many Westerns root themselves in. Nathan Fillion’s Mal Reynolds is an “Independent” soldier, a veteran from a separatist army that lost the war, whose soldiers must now reintegrate themselves under the rule of those they tried to leave. This premise makes the galactic distance more than genre-mashing — it’s a way for Joss Whedon to explore a psychologically complex historical experience without excusing, softening or whitewashing actual Confederate soldiers. This setting allowed Whedon to tell a story other Westerns struggle with. It also helped propel “Firefly” forward as a genre-defining show beloved to this day.

As baffling as the short run of “Deadwood” has always been, it’s made even more so by the fact that it came out of the gate swinging with two Emmy Award nominations for its pilot episode. It was immediately striking among critics, who noted that the period Western had ambitions outside revisiting the genre in the Golden Age of TV.

The dialogue was all at once swear-laden (with dozens of F-words included in the pilot alone) and Shakespearean; characterizations were refreshingly complex and empathetic, even when it came to such dastardly criminals as Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen. Most impressively, the pilot makes vivid the historical reality the people of Deadwood faced — they are attempting to bend a necessarily lawless land, technically illegal in its conception, into something entirely unnatural: civilization as we know it.

Director Walter Hill won the Emmy for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series specifically for this episode, making it the most Emmy-decorated entry on our list. It’s an hour of TV that helped redefine the Western genre.

“Gunsmoke” has gone down in history as one of the greatest classic Western TV shows, if not the greatest. It was certainly among the first, and remains one of the greatest CBS series of all time.That legacy began with an introductory message from none other than John Wayne, who promised audiences the show would be unlike anything they’d seen from the genre on TV up until that point — “It’s honest, it’s adult, it’s realistic.”

The pilot pays this promise off by the end of the first act. The hero, Matt Dillon (a U.S. marshal played by James Arness), is gunned down in the street by an outlaw (Paul Richards). He spends a significant portion of his first appearance recovering from his failure, which grants “Gunsmoke” a sense of consequence and danger that Westerns didn’t have on TV at the time. If it isn’t so obviously impressive to watch for the first time today, it’s because everything “Matt Gets It” established has been used as the foundation for every Western TV show since.

When Graham Yost developed “Justified,” he did so believing in the foundations of Elmore Leonard’s books — that the contemporary crime novel and the Western weren’t so different from one another; that the conventions of Old West storytelling could be translated to the modern day literally and believably. It’s a strong thesis, and one he proves in the opening scene of the series’ peerless pilot episode.

Yost is smartly adapting a single novella here, and it shows in how satisfying and individually effective the pilot is. “Fire in the Hole” introduces audiences to Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan Givens, a deputy U.S. marshal whose methods are explicitly called out as centuries out of step. He gives a man a 24-hour countdown to leave town (in this case, Miami), then quick-draws him at a saloon (a beachside resort). The only major change is that “Justified” is interested in, well, what could justify such an approach to law enforcement. It finds a thrilling answer in Walton Goggins’ Boyd Crowder, introduced later that same episode. That Yost chose to diverge from Leonard’s novel to keep Crowder proves that Yost was the man to turn this paperback page-turner into one of the greatest Western shows of all time.