“I, Bass Reeves, do solemnly swear that I will execute all lawful precepts directed to the Marshall of The United States for the Western District of Arkansas without malice or partiality, perform the duties of Deputy Marshall and take only my lawful fees. So help me God.”
He was the inspiration for the Lone Ranger. Bass Reeves is one of the biggest icons of the old west and perhaps one of the least remembered. He served for 35 years and managed to bring in over 4000 wanted men for their day in court and likely the noose. It’s a huge story, and the filmmakers of Lawmen: Bass Reeves have taken on the enormous task with just 8 episodes of this limited series with no follow-up planned or on the books. Were they able to meet such a challenge? That’s going to require some explanation. The series was based on the first two of a series of books written by Sidney Thompson, who serves as a consultant on the series.
The series attempts to give us the highlights of Bass Reeves’ (Oyelowo) life. So it begins with his time as a slave, where he follows his master George Reeves (Whigham) into the Civil War where he found himself fighting for the wrong side. It’s an insult that leads to anger that finds him an escaped slave taken in by a Seminole woman and her son, played by Margaret Bingham and Riley Looc. There he finds temporary peace and learns from the Native Americans. A tragedy puts him face to face with Esau Pierce (Pepper), a man he knew from the war days. But by now we’ve jumped to 1865 and the end of the war. Pierce would become his life’s nemesis and lead to the climax of this telling of the Bass Reeves story.
The end of the war has Reeves locating the woman he loved from their slavery days. He discovers she has a daughter, and together they start to build their lives as free people and farmers. The family grows, but Reeves fails as a farmer. His life changes when his farm is visited by Deputy Marshal Sherill Lynn (Quaid). He needs Reeves’ help to bring in a tough guy. Reeves proves himself in the job, and before he knows it, Judge Parker (Sutherland) has decided to hire him full time as a deputy marshal. Before you know it, we are in the 1870’s, and his family has increased to five children, but he’s making good money. It appears the job is very much like a bounty hunter. He gets paid by the perp and the relative value of said perp. If he ends up having to kill the guy, he gets a lesser amount for bringing in his boots. Not sure how they identified a man by his boots, but apparently that’s how it was done.
Eventually Bass Reeves has a partner in one-time criminal Billy Crow (Goodluck), and time continues to jump ahead until that final confrontation with Pierce.
The show has all of the look and feel of a Taylor Sheridan series, and there is a good reason for this. He appears to be an executive producer, as the creator is listed as Chad Feehan. He’s worked on shows like Ray Donovan and Banshee. But the more I learn, I question his title of creator. It appears the project has been in development since 2014, and it was the show’s star David Oyelowo who was first approached with the idea. He has made it a bit of a personal crusade ever since. The story goes that it was the star who eventually got with Sheridan, and that’s when this show came together. While Freehan is certainly the show-runner, he can hardly be considered its creator, and the earmarks of Sheridan are dripping from every piece of the show’s actual production. This looks far more like Yellowstone than it does Ray Donovan.
I found the story more compelling than most of Sheridan’s work. As I’ve mentioned often, he’s not a great writer. What he does is create wonderful atmosphere and casts perfectly so that the performance and surroundings are so compelling you enjoy sticking around no matter what’s actually going on. Here the story is more complete, and the character himself is extremely compelling. The problem is all of the jumping around in time. When the episodes were ended, I felt a little cheated. So many years were skipped over that I wanted to see more of those events and stories. What is here is fantastic, but it’s incomplete.
The casting here absolutely bears the mark of the Sheridan group. Each character fits comfortably into their part, and they wear it so naturally that it’s so easy to get pulled in. David Oyelowo has lived with this character for 10 years, and it really shows. He manages a perfect continuity with the man even as we keep jumping forward in time. He has a strong presence that truly does justice to so iconic an historical character. Oyelowo does a great job of showing us how emotionally split the character is. Sometimes he feels like a traitor to his own people and understands what drove them to do the things that have led him to them. He feels he might have made the same bad decisions if luck had gone another way for himself. Dennis Quaid has pretty much been here before. He’s no stranger to the Western, and he plays about the most gut-real kind of ornery character, and I suspect at this point it requires little actual acting. He was born for these characters, and while I wish they had spent more time on the screen together, they have a great chemistry that leaves you wanting to spend time with them together. Lauren E. Banks plays Reeves’ wife Jennie, and she’s underused but makes the most of the part she’s given. Reeves doesn’t spend much time at home. He has fused with his job, and the more he works, the better his family lives. She has a piano, and you can see their wealth grow with the home’s furnishings and the like over time. But they really don’t get quality time with the man himself, so Jennie has become fiercely independent, and Banks does a pretty good job of sharing that evolution with us. She goes from slave to protective and self-reliant mom in very little time. There’s a scene where the wife of their former master Rachel Reeves comes to offer them the “kindness” of bringing them back to the plantation so she can “watch over them”. It’s a defining scene for Baker, and a bit of irony, as Rachel is played by David Oyelowo’s wife, Jessica Oyelowo.
Forrest Goodluck plays his eventual sidekick Billy Crow, and he provides the comic relief. He’s a con man at heart, and he’s always trying to work out some kind of scheme or another. He’s earnest and a faithful partner if not quite as smart. He’s Chester to Oyelowo’s Marshal Dillon. Finally, Donald Sutherland is the wise old Judge Parker, who is kind of in charge of the entire operation. The series plays with some of the history, and it involves Judge Parker. There is an actual incident were Reeves shot a man and claimed he was cleaning his gun. The show makes the incident look far less innocent and causes Judge Parker to make an emotional choice between his firm belief in justice and how he feels about Reeves. It’s a wonderful highlight performance by the elder Sutherland and one of the best moments of the series.
Video
Each episode is presented in its original broadcast aspect ratio of 2.00:1. The 1080p image is arrived at with an AVC MPEG-4 codec. This is a beautifully shot series. The open ranges look quite impressive in this high-definition image presentation. There’s absolutely a movie quality that pretty much all shows claim to have, but truly exists here. There’s a lot of texture to be found in the horses and dirty clothes of the cowboys. Colors are rather bright and realistic. Flesh tones are pretty much reference, and I can’t help thinking what this might look like in 4K. Black levels are also nice. Paramount doesn’t load the discs up with too many episodes, so you get respectable bit rates and no compression issues. This is the kind of thing that looks so much better on disc than it ever could through a video stream.
Audio
The Dolby Digital Tru-HD 5.1 track delivers what you really need. Certainly there’s some expansion during action scenes, but it’s the quiet and intimate moments where all of that atmosphere bleeds so well into the audio presentation. Not often a use of heavy subs, but dialog comes through nicely.
Special Features
Behind The Story: Each episode as a 3-4 minute behind-the-scenes feature that looks at that particular episode. There is plenty of cast and crew interview clips as well as too many clips from the episode you just watched.
Unbreakable – The Legend Of Bass Reeves: (39:19) This is a rather extensive look into the historical character himself. There’s lots of good information on his history to be found here. We also get an idea of the evolution of the idea to the final series production. Cast and crew offer their insights into the man along with Thompson, who wrote the trilogy of books.
A Breed Apart – Production Design: (16:59) The production designer gives us a look at all of the elements used to add authenticity to the show. It’s an earmark of everything Taylor Sheridan does, and this one turns into a love-fest for the show’s production design. The feature covers research and location scouting.
The Native American Nations: (4:31) This feature looks at the depiction of the various Native American tribes and their culture and language.
Behind The Battle Of Pea Ridge: (4:56) The series opens with this huge Civil War battle, and we get to see that it was made using hundreds of extras and horses and not added by CGI. I love when these things are done with practical sets and people, and it’s a huge scene for a television series.
Building The World Of Lawmen: Bass Reeves: (5:37) This is more or less a promo piece that gives us pretty much standard cast and crew sound bites and some behind-the-scenes footage. It’s a catch-all kind of feature.
The Legend Behind The Badge: (4:22) Another PR piece that focuses on the main character.
Meet The Characters: (7:22) There are short pieces on eight characters of less than a minute each on average. There’s a play-all option.
Final Thoughts:
The Lawmen start to the title suggests that there may be an ongoing series based on different lawmen, and not necessarily from the Old West. I would rather there had been more to this. They had a great cast and a compelling story, but it felt too abridged. Too much story left on the bone. Perhaps they’ll come back to it in some future time. I’d welcome a longer stay with Bass Reeves, to be sure. I guess there’s something about telling a story “without a bullet wasted”.