Episode 1 of "The Young Riders" opens with "The Kid" (probably hailing from the same name-starved locale that produced "The Virginian") down on his luck; he procures a horse through a boxing match and joins a group seeking to work for the Pony Express - the first attempt to deliver American transcontinental mail in ten days or less.
Some background is worthwhile about how YR came about at the end of the 1980's. The TV Western boom had crested and receded by the early 1970's; the homestead generation core audience that came of age hearing frontier dinner tales (and had lived at the end of a rural-majority U. S.) during the 1920's had largely passed on, and the prime time market demanded urban comedies and crime dramas. Plus, the genre had been fairly exhausted from storyline repetition and the inability of radio-trained writers hobbled by network restraints to show character growth. Notable as well was post-Vietnam repulsion to screen violence, which knocked out two legs from the three-legged Westerns support saloon stool. Finally, genre homage (expectations of standard marshal v. Rustlers stories, etc.) further constrained the ability of showrunners to present much new or innovative; "Little House on the Prairie" was now what passed for frontier drama. But then, during the 1980's:
- The accession of the Reagan era encouraged new veneration for traditional genres;
- Hollywood found receptiveness to "Brat Pack" aggregations of young actors in genre settings;
- Viewing tastes dialed back a bit from the post-Vietnam no-violence diet, and were more receptive to diverse characters with flaws and real romantic interests;
- In turn more realistic storylines for traditionally underserved women and minorities now presented themselves, and
- Ken Burns "The Civil War" (1990) documentary series reopened interest in the Civil War years. (It remains Burns' best work before he fell away from talking devolved into blue-state preachiness.)
Some of the above found their way into
1988's "Young Guns," about Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War, which would get into
a brief trademark spat with YR. And, in varying quantities they provided a measure of revival to the Western - if no return to the heyday, at least a decent retirement home support system. New offering ranged from the forgettable "Silverado," better presented as an actors' in-house home movie, to the better "Lonesome Dove" miniseries.
So, YR emerges at the end of the Reagan years. A Pony Express relay station in Nebraska provided the venue, allowing the express rider characters to move freely about the West into varying dramatic situations and access to the Civil War run-up in Kansas and Missouri. The lineup began as follows:
* Longtime character actor and Westerns genre specialist Anthony Zerbe (very menacing as the chief mutant in "The Omega Man") as the station patriarch "Teaspoon Hunter;"
* Melissa Leo, noted for work on "Homicide," is the initial station cook and all-around den mother "Emma Shannon;"
* A younger Josh Brolin, en route to a successful movie career playing stonefaced heavies and villains, is one of two historical personas - in this case " Wild Bill" Hickok;
* The second, "Buffalo Bill" Cody, is portrayed by Stephen Baldwin. The Baldwin acting clan enjoyed a 1990's heyday, but Stephen Baldwin's film career receded fast after "Bio Dome." (Strangely, the film is better remembered than the 1990's pseudo-science experiment it parodied.)
* "Kid" is played by Ty Miller, who kept his hand in through guest roles through 2019;
* "Ike McSwain," a deaf-mute rider likely on board to mark the new ADA-friendly era of the 1990's was portrayed by Travis Fine; Fine went on to accumulate a number of credits as a producer.
* "Running Buck Cross" was a rider of mixed Kiowa and European heritage, and his presence as played by Gregg Rainwater (of Cherokee-Osage descent and later an animation actor) nodded to the 1990's need for more complete Native American storylines; and
* "Louise McCloud" stands in for Western women as a female rider masquerading as a man to rescue her siblings from an orphanage; Yvonne Suhor easily switched between gender roles and kept up a romance with Kid far more fruitful than Missoula Kitty's dalliance with Matt Dillon in "Gunsmoke." Suhor went on to teach acting at the university level, and in perhaps the series' most tragic note from a 2024 perspective, she died early of cancer in 2018.
Historically and continuity-wise, the series setting was somewhat more realistic than the ranches and marshal's offices occupied by the Western forever bachelors of the 1960's. But of note, the substantial town portrayed as Sweetwater, Neb. Did not originate until 1870, and the Pony Express timeframe was limited to early 1860 to late 1861. Cody and Hickok worked for the parent company of the express, the freight company of Russell, Majors and Waddell, but were not transcontinental express riders. The "Bleeding Kansas" anti v. Pro-slavery civil strife that YR attempts to tap into was resolved by the admission of Kansas as a free state in 1859, was much reduced if not idled in the progression to the larger war and not really a backdrop to the Pony Express.
The pilot's progress goes as expected - a series of introductory vignettes to get the premise and characters launched. Tryouts and training for the riders take up a good deal of time, and Teaspoon introduces a naval multi-barreled boarding gun for station defense, but the type was unlikely to have ever made it to Nebraska. The gang does coalesce for a shootout with a hastily-introduced bandit cohort which steals a mail pouch (though how they plan to profit off of the likely legal documents and newspapers is left unclear.) Suhor's character is set up for an early reveal.
Much of the series was filmed at Old Tucson, Arizona (keeping up the tradition of Western directors that scenes set on the Great Plains are simply too flat for good photography if they are actually shot on location), but the pilot appears to have been done in "Wagon Train" country, namely south central California. The hour has a greenish tint to the background not seen in many other episodes, perhaps filmed on a different shooting schedule.
Too much box-checking to make this a notable and iconic pilot, but the furniture is set out for memorable outings as Season 1 commences.
0 out of 0 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
