Taylor Sheridan · 2021 · overland

Taylor Sheridan's 2021 miniseries, the origin story behind Yellowstone. James Dutton takes his family out of Fort Worth with a wagon train of German and Romani immigrants who have never driven a team, crossed a river or fired a gun. The narrator is his daughter Elsa, and the series is honest from the first episode about how many of them arrive.

1. 1
   Fort Worth

   James Dutton meets his family in a town of cattle pens, gamblers and a marshal who settles things in the street - and takes charge of a wagon train of immigrants whose organisers have prepared them for nothing at all.

2. 2
   The Trinity

   The first river crossing is the series announcing its terms: the wagons go in, the current takes them, and the company loses people who could not swim and were never told they would need to.

3. 3
   Doan's Crossing

   At the store on the Red River, the last supply point before the territory, the train reprovisions and takes stock - and everything north of here is outside the reach of any law they would recognise.

4. 4
   The Comanche country

   Through the territory, where the encounters are more complicated than the genre usually allows, and where Elsa's narration starts to sound less like a girl's and more like someone who has seen the arithmetic.

5. 5
   Denver

   Shea Brennan tells the immigrants to stop here, that Oregon will kill them and Colorado will not - and the ones who listen live. James decides to keep going, which is a choice the series does not let him off.

6. 6
   Wyoming

   North through the high country, and the raid that puts an arrow into Elsa - a wound that will not kill her quickly, so the last stretch is spent riding beside her father while she runs out of time.

7. 7
   Paradise Valley

   She chooses the spot herself, in the Montana valley where the grass runs to the mountains, and James buries her there and stays - which is how the Duttons come to own the ranch that the whole franchise is about.