1883 (TV Series)
Watchable wagon-train series, good characters/story, crappy history.
~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2022-03-02 |
The characters were interesting, the story was well written, and the pacing was interesting to watch. The Dutton family flees Texas and travels through the great planes to build a better future in Montana. Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Sam Elliott all do good jobs, as does the less famous cast. So if you like period pieces and like Yellowstone, watch it.
Light Spoilers (and complaints)[edit | edit source]
The downside is it feels like there was a woke writer that would occasionally inject they/them's opinions, and apply a little presentism (fallacy of judging the past by today's standards) on the show.
What do I mean?
- What if Margaret Dutton (Faith Hill) could have a lecture to her free-spirited daughter about how unfair the world is to women with expectations holding them down, and she's going to have to settle for being oppressed by crushing sexism. (You could practically hear her whine about wanting to burn her bra and corsette, and be a professional pants-suit lady).
- What if her daughter was the first feminist skank, hooking up her way across the great plains, and her parents and the wagon train were OK with it?
- What if the Native Americans were all misunderstood good guys, wiser and more far-seeing in their ways than the uncivilized white folks
- What if evil corporations were a problem with the great plains and going to divide everything us into huge agricorps, in leftist foreshadowing
- What if we could add a good interracial marriage -- that could end in Oregon -- a State that was founded on White Supremacy and forbade blacks at all, let alone interracial marriage
- Let's make Sam the mentally distraught warrior (in lefty-land all ex-military are broken and traumatized)
- They tried to make Margaret Dutton a strong woman -- but at times she was just a bitch who was going to hate her husband for some past grievance and having to go on the trek, and then hate him later for not wanting to fight with her over everything.
Throw on top plot holes and other quirks.
- Indians were hunting in warpaint, and who immediately attacked but had time to convernt hunting arrots into war-arrows (cover them in manure)
- Every snake bite was lethal, and they were everywhere. (40%+ of bites are dry, and most of the rest are survivable -- even back then). More people were likely to die from bee stings on the trail than snake bites.
- One train is going to be hit by everything bad, multiple bandits, Indian wars, corrupt landholders, tornadoes, and so on.
And so on, and so on. They were small annoyances and spread out. But they kind of added up to not helping for me.
Conclusion[edit | edit source]
Everything bad that can happen, will. I realize you need to keep the drama and excitement up -- but they seem to have the odds of survival back then at about 6%, instead of more like 95% (and the 6-10% that died, usually did so of disease, not as much to bandits, Indian massacres or snake bites). So they got carried away with death rates, and a lot of little details that felt like a 21st century woke writer wanted to do Django Unchained, and jab at our current culture, rather than an accurate period piece.
So entertaining drivel. When with just a smidge more historical consistency, it could have been a lot better. But that's not Hollywood.
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