The Western - Television Tropes & Idioms

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alt title(s): Western

Any story set in the American West during the frontier era (from about 1840 to 1890).

Perhaps surprisingly, the Western genre is actually Older Than They Think, having its roots in the 19th century "dime novels", meaning that like the gangster films of The Thirties it was usually pretty much contemporary with its source material. In fact no less a figure than Wild Bill Hickok was already a star in dozens of embellished stories by the time he died in 1876. By the turn of the century a lot of the stock Western tropes had already been established in popular imagination.

Westerns made a very early leap to film with The Great Train Robbery in 1903, and remained popular throughout the next few decades, though their golden age truly arrived in the 1930s.

Enormously popular on TV and in the movies in the 1950s and 1960s: Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Rawhide, Branded, The Wild Wild West, Have Gun Will Travel, The Rifleman, The Big Valley...

Some of the more recent successful TV examples were Grizzly Adams and Dr Quinn Medicine Woman.

Common plotlines include a Cattle Drive, a Train Job, and a Bank Robbery.

There's a Wanted Poster on every wall.

There's an important distinction between the "classic" Western (The Lone Ranger-type stuff) and the "revisionist" Western (High Noon, the "Dollars" trilogy, Unforgiven). The former is shiny and heroic. The latter is Darker And Edgier, and often embodies a paradox: "Civilization can only be defended from barbarians by men with guns, but once you pick up a gun, you are a barbarian." In the 21st century, the distinction seems fuzzy, as most of the "best" Westerns are the revisionist ones — and therefore they are now seen as the core of the genre.

In recent decades the genre was only seen on TV in the form of its hybrid child the Space Western, but it is now enjoying something of a revival with the success of Deadwood in 2004. Two networks, according to the British Radio Times, have new series in development.

For series that use Western tropes but are set in the modern day, see New Old West.

A subtrope of Period Piece. See also Western Characters and Spaghetti Western. Cross The Western with Science Fiction, and you get Cattle Punk.

Examples

Film

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Shane
John Ford is perhaps the most important director in the genre, responsible for must-watch films like:
Rio Bravo
High Noon
The Magnificent Seven
The Proposition, a western set in Australia
Back To The Future Part III, sort of.
Young Guns and sequels
Silverado
The Quick and the Dead
- Both of them.
The Wild Bunch
White Sun Of The Desert — the most famous Soviet Ostern
True Grit
Deconstructions such as Mc Cabe & Mrs. Miller and Dead Man, and parodies like Blazing Saddles
Tombstone
Unforgiven

Literature

The Virginian, the father of 20th-century Western literature.
Almost every novel written by Louis L'Amour.
Lonesome Dove.
Blood Meridian.
The Dark Tower novels by Stephen King, most notably The Gunslinger, Wolves of the Calla and Roland's backstory in Wizards and Glass, borrow extensively from this genre. The latter story even lampshades this when the other members of his ka-tet ask if the tale he's going to tell is a Western. A puzzled Roland replies that it does, indeed, take place in the Western Byronies...
Flashman and the Redskins by George MacDonald Fraser