'The English' Belongs With The Best Neo-Westerns

There’s a noticeable difference between a writer who can effortlessly pen pulp stories (or at least authentically recreate a pulpy voice and tone) and a writer who certainly enjoys a bit of pulp, but whose attempts to write in a rich, entrenched genre come across a little faux. This is forgivable – not everyone can be Sam Raimi or Tarantino – but usually, when you watch a neo-Western, there’s not enough time in a film to let the slowly germinating themes and reflections breathe, while also delivering stylistic bombasity with eye-popping action and over-stylized filmmaking. The balance is hard to find in a sub-2 hour runtime, something Netflix’s The Harder They Fall exemplified last year. So if you’re not clicking with someone knowingly writing pulp in the first 10 minutes, it’s unlikely to get any better by the end.

This makes The English, a six-episode miniseries from Hugo Blick, a welcome exception. Blick had an especially difficult job of not just writing a pulpy throwback, but a quintessential American genre written by a Briton (although Blick did draw from his experience in the West as a child). Thankfully, after a rocky first episode of Deadwood-wannabe dialogue and clunky set-ups, the show gets into its stride to become as authentic as the best neo-Westerns, benefiting from its incisive and occasionally subtle modern stylings.

The series begins with an English lady, Cornelia (Emily Blunt), in mourning in a manor filled with Native American artifacts and photos of a Native man, who we’ll learn is Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a former Union soldier. We join them in the past, as Cornelia and Eli set off across the frontier on separate missions of retribution: to reclaim the land he is owed and to kill the man responsible for her son’s death.