Godless

Frank’s series blends the best of the genre with unfamiliar narratives about gender, race, and faith. All the while, it builds a mystery around the past while driving to a pivotal showdown in the future. Every moment counts, making for an overall experience as to-the-point as Mary Agnes herself.

The result is a series that feels both traditional and new, with the big-screen qualities of a film and the story and character nuance of the best serialized television. This last is exploited to best advantage by Frank's cast.

Godless represents a near-perfect melding of both forms [movie and TV series], making good on the boundless promises of the streaming frontier. Though it’s tempting to gallop through it in a single binge, Godless is worth slowing down and savoring.

Anyone pining for an honest-to-God Western with vividly mythic characters, soaring vistas and thrilling showdowns will find the seven episodes of Godless a heaven-sent, rip-roaring Thanksgiving-week feast. [13-26 Nov 2017, p.16]

Godless might remind you of HBO’s still lamented “Deadwood” in its expert plotting.

Godless is a work of confident artistry, casting well-worn clichés and archetypes in a fresh, illuminating light.

The seven-episode series has all the tropes of classic models: outlaws, train heists, brooding heroes, disillusioned lawmen, boundless scenery. But it also has the weight of a world in which something is out of balance. The tension between freedom and order, between outlaw individualism and functioning communities, has come to a breaking point.

Ultimately, the sheer pleasure of Godless defeats any reservations you may have about it. Daniels is both hilarious and scary, and he’s clearly having a great time pulling on his scraggly beard as this project’s ultimate villain. And there’s a long, well-staged shootout at the end that is both very-traditional-western and something totally new, because more than half the shooters are women, with guns blazing.

It's both smart and entertaining in the process.

Godless might have benefited from a slighter quicker pace, but its various plots come together to create a finish that simultaneously feels unconventional, satisfying and -- most significantly in the current wild west of bingeing -- well worth the ride.

Godless is a wonderfully modern addition to the genre that’s simultaneously classic and traditional in all the right ways.

Godless manages to come across as both familiar and fresh. Plot lines are recognizable without becoming trite. Characters are taken to predictable extremes without sliding into caricatures.

The series is a wild ride, an old-fashioned Western with a contemporary edge. It carries the sweep and breadth of a grand tale with the larger-than-life ornery characters you expect to find living and dying in that rugged, lonely land.

Several episodes smartly use their contained structure to surprise and stir viewers, while others languish. Some of its many subplots are developed better than others. Still, Godless smooths over these flaws with a rousing score or a melodramatic death scene. It may be a simple story of good versus evil, but there's a reason that formulaworks. And good Godless, it works here.

The supporting cast (including Scott McNairy, Kim Coates, and Daniels’ Newsroom costar Sam Waterston) is strong, but no one is more electric than the always extraordinary Merritt Wever. ... And yet, the series still sometimes feels self-indulgent and self-congratulatory, with its looooooonng shots of horses running through water or tousled-haired townsfolk looking out in the distance. ... At least when Wever is on screen, schooling a shop owner with her pistol on why he can’t insult her niece, the show seems to find a more comfortable stride.

Even if the flaws remain obvious, it’s worth following this story into the desert. There’s great acting to be found, and some thoughtful writing--and if you like sweeping panoramas of the sun setting across an untamed wild, then you’re in excellent, if heavy, hands.

If he [writer/director Scott Frank] doesn’t achieve the visual or narrative poetry of the filmmakers he’s riffing on--the John Fords, Howard Hawkses and Robert Altmans--he still gives you plenty to look at, and it’s never boring.

Fortunately, the acting is strong enough to keep things interesting, even with the usual Netflix drama pacing issues (which only Stranger Things seems largely immune to).

Godless doesn’t reinvent the wagon wheel, but it gets a few good spins out of trusty Western standbys in its too-long seven-hour run. The limited series struggles to recover from an early peak; in the final 20 minutes of the premiere episode, all the pieces for an epic oater fall into place. ... The gunfights are captivating, and Scott Frank sure knows how to pepper in the comic relief, but Godless all comes back to La Belle.

When the action gets up close and personal, it helps that Godless’s cast is by and large top-notch. ... After watching more than seven hours of Godless, it’s also a little hard to understand whether Frank is paying tribute to Westerns of old or indulging in their most basic clichés just because he can.

The only major issue with Godless as a thoughtful and engaging entertainment is that you’re constantly aware that it could have been so much more than that.

It’s disappointing that such a beautiful show, with such fine performers, could not have offered more than an outdated fairy tale.

Godless equates female empowerment with armament and never investigates the myriad sources that victimize the town's women, remaining more invested in the petty male quarrel that catches them in the crossfire.