The English

Every one of them gets a moment. Blick, unusually, writes even the people who appear in a single episode as if their episode is the one the whole show is about.

🧠 What It Is Really About

The official summary says revenge Western. That is accurate and unhelpful.

What The English is actually about is colonial violence and who pays for it. The specific violence done to Indigenous peoples in the American West, yes. Also the less-cinematic violence done to women and to immigrants, and to anyone whose labour built the frontier and whose name nobody wrote down. Eli Whipp is a Pawnee man who served as a US Cavalry scout, and the show refuses to let that be a simple heroic backstory. It is a moral injury, and the series treats it as one.

Blick also has things to say about England. Cornelia is not just a point-of-view character for American audiences. She is an indictment of the country that sent her. The English, the show gently reminds you, invented a lot of this, and the specific cruelties of the American frontier are the specific cruelties of empire with the accents swapped out.

The title is doing more work than it looks like.

🎨 Style & Atmosphere

Visually this is one of the most striking things the BBC has put out in a decade. Blick shot most of the American locations in Spain, and the choice gives the series a strange, sun-bleached quality. The skies are too huge. The light is too flat. Everything feels slightly off, which is exactly right for a story about people who are on the wrong continent doing wrong things.

The cinematography by Arnau Valls Colomer favours long static wides that let the land dwarf the actors, then cuts in close enough to catch a specific eye-twitch. It is a show that understands Leone and John Ford and then argues with both of them. My wife walked past while I was watching episode three and stopped for twenty minutes because of how the frame was composed, not because she had any idea who anyone was.

The score by Federico Jusid is sparse, melodic, and often carried by a solo voice. It never telegraphs. Violence tends to arrive to silence or to a single held note, which makes it land harder than any swelling orchestral cue would.

The dialogue is stylised to the edge of theatrical. Characters make speeches. They quote poetry. They monologue about God and land and about mothers who are not coming back. If you want naturalism, watch a different Western. If you can meet the show on its own slightly-elevated level, the writing is gorgeous.

📈 Reception & Legacy

Critics loved it. It sits at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and earned BAFTA nominations for Best Mini-Series and for Emily Blunt's lead performance, as well as Emmy nominations for Blunt, Spencer, writing, directing, cinematography, and music.

The reception of Chaske Spencer's performance was particularly notable. He had been working in the industry for years, mostly in supporting parts, and this was the role that announced him as a lead actor. Emmy recognition for an Indigenous actor in a leading role in a Western is not a thing that happens often, and when it does it matters.

Commercially the series did the job for Amazon. Critically it joined the small shelf of modern Westerns that actually add to the genre instead of rehashing it. Think Deadwood, Godless, or the Yellowstone prequel 1883. The English belongs on that shelf.

🏆 Why It Works

Because it is not embarrassed to be a Western and it is not embarrassed to be a tragedy.

Most modern prestige TV is allergic to sincerity. Blick is not. He wants you to care about Cornelia Locke and Eli Whipp as intensely as you cared about anyone on TV in 2022, and he is willing to stage scenes with operatic emotional stakes to make sure you do. Some of those scenes risk tipping into melodrama. A couple probably do. I would rather a show swing for something and occasionally land awkwardly than never swing at all.

The show also knows when to stop. Six episodes. One story. Blick could have padded it into a franchise and the BBC would almost certainly have paid for a second season. Instead the thing ends when the thing is over, which is the most un-American decision an American-set Western has made in a long time.

If you liked Godless for its willingness to sit in silence with the West, you will like this. If you liked 1883 for its seriousness about what the frontier cost the people who crossed it, you will like this more. And if you have any patience at all for a show that takes its time and trusts you to keep up, The English is one of the best six-hour blocks of television anyone made that year.

A small, furious masterpiece of a series.

Valerie Pachner

Supporting Actor