September 1989 was monumental for the cast and crew of Lonesome Dove. Not only did the miniseries starring Robert Duvall enter the Emmy Awards as an 18-time nominee, but it left the ceremony a seven-time winner and was later cemented one of the greatest miniseries of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
A four-part television event, the CBS series became more than just a small-screen hit; the cattle-drive classic helped prove that the Western genre still had plenty of life left on television.
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View this post on Instagram“With a sweeping narrative approach that embraces the iconography of the Old West, Lonesome Dove revitalized Westerns and limited series at a time when both were on the decline,” EW wrote. “The novel’s epic scope—geographical, temporal, and emotional—could hardly be contained in a two-hour movie, but the four-part miniseries does the story justice.”
Before the Duvall series hit the trail in 1989, the television Western landscape was already well-trodden from its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, when Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Have Gun—Will Travel were among the medium’s biggest shows. By the 1970s and ’80s, the genre had largely dried up as networks turned toward grittier, more urban dramas like Kojak and The Rockford Files.
Lonesome Dove, however, changed all that.
Premiering Feb. 5, 1989, the miniseries defied expectations, pulling in an estimated 26 million viewers and challenging the notion that viewers had lost their appetite for the frontier. The Los Angeles Times even reported that Lonesome Dove was the highest-rated miniseries in five years.
According to director Simon Wincer (The Last Frontier), per Cowboys & Indians, network executives saw him as “the guy who could shoot [the miniseries on] a television schedule and give it a feature look. I wasn’t preconditioned by Hollywood westerns and stuff like that, so I brought a fresh look to the whole Western genre, if you like.”
Wincer’s approach paid off. But it helped that he had good material to work with in the first place.
The series was based on Larry McMurtry’s 1985 novel of the same name, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. A sweeping saga that unfolds over a 1,500-mile cattle drive from Texas to Montana, the story centers on the relationship between retired Texas Rangers Augustus “Gus” McCrae, played by Duvall, and Woodrow F. Call, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who shine in their efforts to bring McMurtry’s deeply human characters and tragic, unromanticized look at the Wild West to life.
It also helps to have a stellar cast. And despite the Western being relegated to a “dead genre” at the time, the project attracted a who’s who of elite Hollywood, including the aforementioned Duvall and Jones, as well as Diane Lane, Chris Cooper, Ricky Schroder, Timothy Scott, Robert Urich, Danny Glover, and Anjelica Huston.
But the series really belongs to Duvall, who anchors the story as Gus McCrae, one of the most beloved characters ever to grace the page and screen. A philosophical, lazy, and deeply charming hedonist, Gus loves women, whiskey, and cards, and he understands that the point of living is actually to enjoy life.
According to Duvall, who calls the Lonesome Dove his Hamlet, he was born to play Gus. “It was a mighty role and a lot of fun to film,” Duvall once said in a video posted to his Facebook page, calling Lonesome Dove “one of the highlights of my life, completely.”
Lauded for its deep character development and loyalty to McMurtry’s novel, the series also won two Golden Globe Awards in 1990, including Best Television Limited Series and Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series for Duvall. With an unwavering 98% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, numerous entertainment awards, and a legacy that has stretched across nearly four decades, Lonesome Dove continues to collect flowers.
The remarkable effort didn’t just revive a genre; it became the kind of story families keep returning to years later.
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