By Martin Keady · November 10, 2023
Technically, The English is a miniseries, because it consists of just six one-hour episodes. In reality, however, there is absolutely nothing “mini” or even small about The English. It is a truly epic piece of screen storytelling that might just be the best Western ever made for film, television, or any other medium.
The English is the work of Hugo Blick, who is himself English. Far more importantly, Blick might just have proved himself to be the first Englishman (indeed, the first non-American) to have made a TV series so magnificent that it bears comparison with the greatest television of the last 20 years, from The Sopranos to The Wire to Mad Men (the Holy Trinity of 21st century TV).
Here are six reasons (one for each one-hour episode) why you should see it and why it might well be the greatest Western ever made for any screen medium.
Although The English is, as a mini-series, relatively short at just about six hours or so, that is still far longer than any Western film ever made, including the finest films of the genre such as The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and Unforgiven. Consequently, it is relatively easy to argue that if The English is not the best Western ever made (in terms of quality), then it is certainly the greatest Western ever made (in terms of quantity, or running time).
If this sounds slightly facetious, it is not meant to be. The simple truth is that the far greater running times of TV series, even of supposed miniseries like The English, enable them to examine their subject in much greater depth and detail than any film ever could in two or three hours. Consequently, just as The Sopranos is arguably the greatest gangster story ever told on screen, The Wire is definitely the greatest crime drama ever told on screen and Mad Men is the greatest workplace drama ever told, so The Wire is the greatest Western story ever told on screen.
As we have all discovered over the last two decades, at its best TV allows for the kind of forensic, long-form storytelling that is almost impossible in cinema, especially today, when so much of it (for obvious commercial reasons) is overwhelmingly targeted at children and teenage audiences. By complete contrast, The English, just like The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men, is absolutely adult, in every sense of the word but above all in the sense of being complex and indeed impossible to simplify.
‘The English’
The Western is arguably the ultimate American genre in all art forms, from the visual art of Bierstadt and Remington to the writing of Longfellow and Fenimore Cooper. However, it is in cinema that the Western is uniquely important. Because of the relative inexpensiveness of filming Westerns (the “sets” were all still there, in the form of the American landscape), Hollywood soon realized that Westerns were both cheap to make and quintessentially American, allowing for the creation of a cinematic mythology that lasted throughout almost the whole of the 20th century and that extended globally.
However, very few, if any, of the original or “classic” Westerns addressed the original sin or crime behind The American Dream that they so often celebrated, namely the theft of America from its original or indigenous people, the Native Americans (or Red Indians, as they were so often and so dismissively called). If the fate of the Native Americans, forced off their land by incoming White settlers, was ever referred to, it was usually only as a sub-plot or as a justification for the actions of the main White characters in response to it. That is exemplified by The Searchers (1956), in which John Wayne literally searches for his niece after she is abducted by Comanches.
It is only in a particular, historically specific sub-genre of the Western, the so-called “Vietnam Western”, which at the end of the Vietnam War (in the late 1960s and early 1970s) used the Western format to examine the then-contemporary conflict in Vietnam, that this act of genocide was directly addressed. Probably the finest “Vietnam Western” is Ulzana’s Raid (1972), directed by the great Robert Aldrich, in which a group of young Native Americans effectively embark on a suicide mission of raiding and killing rather than settle for “imprisonment” (as they see it) on their reservation.
‘The English’
The themes and ideas examined in Ulzana’s Raid and other Vietnam Westerns are examined and indeed amplified in The English. It directly examines the original sin or crime at the heart of American culture and American identity: the taking of America from the Native Americans by “The English”, which, we learn at the start of the series, is the generic Native American term for all white people. And this is not just an add-on or an optional extra; it is what The English is all about.
The English is written, directed, and produced by one of the great geniuses of 21st-century television, Britain’s Hugo Blick. He began writing, directing, and producing more than 20 years ago with a brilliant little comic gem called Marion and Geoff (2000-2003), which was the ultimate in low-budget screen storytelling as it featured just one man, Keith, sitting in his car and talking directly to the camera about his wife, Marion, who had left him for another man, called Geoff. (It says everything about Keith’s low self-esteem and indeed virtual invisibility as a character that his one-man or one-person show is named after other people.)
Over the next decade, Blick produced other skillful, subtle small-screen British comedies such as Sensitive Skin (2005) and Roger and Val Have Just Got In (2010). However, in the last dozen years or so, he has transitioned into drama (although even his comedies were always inherently dramatic), beginning with a procedural cop drama The Shadow Line (2011), whose relatively bathetic ending was largely deemed to have let down an otherwise genuinely dramatic series. Eventually, he became more ambitious (and international) in scope, with Black Earth Rising (2018), a TV miniseries about the search for war criminals, especially those involved in the Rwandan genocide. Perhaps it was his examination of probably the most recent genocide in human history that led him to consider one of the greatest (i.e. most horrific) genocides of them all, namely that of the Native American people.
‘The English’
The English is brilliantly written and directed by Blick, with not a single scene or even a single character being wasted or made to feel superfluous. In that sense, it is comparable to the greatest ever writing on screen (TV, film, internet, XR, whatever), namely that of The Wire. Just like The Wire, The English demands that you “Listen Closely” (which was the original tagline of The Wire). Just as any viewer of The Wire literally had to listen closely to understand the drug dealers’ (and indeed the cops’) quiet and code-heavy or jargon-heavy conversations, so any viewer of The English has to listen closely to its brilliant recreation of the original Wild West. Just as in The Wire, almost everyone in The English speaks quietly, some because English is not their first language and some because they obviously do not want to be heard (probably because they have nefarious intentions). You literally have to “lean in” to the dialogue to hear it, but when you do it completely repays all your effort.
If screen storytelling (again, on TV, film, internet, XR, or whatever) is ultimately a combination of great writing and great photography (or, more precisely, cinematography), then The English is truly great screen storytelling. The cinematography is just as extraordinary, in that it is simultaneously epic and intimate, as the writing. Even on a TV screen, the apparently endless plains of Kansas or the wild mountains of Wyoming look vast and gigantic – indeed, as vast and gigantic as they must have looked to their original inhabitants (the Native Americans) and the people who ultimately drove them out (the White settlers).
Like so many so-called 1960s “Spaghetti Westerns” (which should really have been called “Paella Westerns”), The English was shot in Spain, rather than in North America, to save money for what was essentially a European production (even if it was co-financed by Amazon, an American company). Blick has talked about how he wanted to show his characters as being literally tiny in this incredible and largely unpeopled landscape, and time and again he achieves that, from the scene in the first episode when a stagecoach is pursued across a vast plain by the men who want to rob it right through to the ending of the series, which is played out against the backdrop of Wyoming.
‘The English’
And time and again, I was reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sublime literary evocation of America in The Great Gatsby: “the fresh, green breast of the new world”, which is “the last and greatest of all human dreams”, especially for the Dutch explorers who were the first Whites to discover it and who consequently came “face to face for the last time in human history with something commensurate to the human capacity for wonder.” The sublime cinematography of The English evokes a similar feeling of “wonder”.
Its title is the key to The English, showing the importance for a writer of having a truly great title that somehow encapsulates all their ideas and feelings about the story they are telling. Initially, viewers might think that it just refers to Emily Blunt’s “Lady Cordelia” (like her Shakespearean namesake, she proves to be a truly tragic heroine), who is one of the two main characters, alongside the Indian scout (who had previously worked for the US Cavalry), Eli Whipp, who she enlists to help her find the man she believes has wronged her and caused the death of her son. Then, through Eli, we learn that “The English” is the Native American term for all white settlers.
Finally, however, right at the end of the series we learn how important England and the actual English were to the whole mythologization of the West, not least because, as The English eventually reveals, the first ever “Western” film was made not in North America but in the North of England, specifically Blackburn in Lancashire, in 1899. So, The English comes full circle in the mythologizing – and demythologizing – of the West. And perhaps it took an Englishman like Hugo Blick, an outsider (or at least a non-American), to achieve that.
‘The English’
Finally, perhaps the most powerful element of The English is that it shows you, like almost all great stories, how to survive and ultimately how to live. And that is when even the very worst things (of the kind that happen to almost all the characters in it and especially the main characters) have happened to you – rape, murder, and the destruction of your family; in short, the realization of your worst fears. In that respect, it reminds me of almost every great story ever told, from Hamlet to The English Patient (the similarity between the titles of these two great works is surely not a coincidence): it is a journey through hell, but it shows how to survive such a journey.
However, notwithstanding the validity of these reasons for watching The English, perhaps the best reason to watch it is that it has one of the greatest-ever screen villains, brought to life in one of the greatest-ever screen performances. In fact, it made me wonder: if the Devil has the best tunes, do the best stories have the best (i.e. the worst) Devils? Certainly, The English has one of the very best screen devils of them all.
Rafe Spall plays David Melmont in The English. I do not want to give away any spoilers, but Melmont is quite simply one of the greatest “baddies” in any screen story ever, and not just in the Western genre. And Spall’s inhabitation of him (“performance” seems too small a word for his brilliant realization of Melmont) bears comparison with the greatest screen baddie or psycho performance of them all, namely Ben Kingsley’s Don in Sexy Beast (2000). Just as Kingsley’s Don made you genuinely fearful (even to the extent of withdrawing slightly from the screen), so Spall’s Melmont creates a sense of genuine dread.
Indeed, Melmont almost embodies Hannah Arendt’s famous line about “the banality of evil”, the subtitle of her superb account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in the early 1960s, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Melmont is truly evil, but he is also truly banal, most notably when he praises (and later recalls) the “pretty music” that he heard after committing the heinous crime that sets in motion the events of The English. The English is a great TV show; indeed, it is arguably the greatest Western ever made in any format; and in Spall’s Melmont, it has one of the greatest screen villains of all time.
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