Tame West

Karl Urban. Photo / Norrie Montgomery

Welcome to the lucrative Lonesome Dove industry. Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was made into a phenomenally successful 1989 miniseries - considered the greatest TV Western ever - which won every award going and spawned four follow-ups. That may have been one too many.

The latest, Comanche Moon, playing out on consecutive nights on TV3 from tomorrow, is a prequel to Lonesome Dove, with Steve Zahn as Texas Ranger Gus McCrae (the role made famous by Robert Duvall in the original) and New Zealand's Karl Urban as his stony-faced pardner Woodrow Call (Tommy Lee Jones in the original.) Val Kilmer plays Inish Scull, their eccentric captain, and Rachel Griffiths is his randy, ruthless wife Inez.

The script was written by McMurtry with Diana Ossana, who won an Oscar for her Brokeback Mountain screenplay. Western aficionado Alan Bara in Salon said McMurtry managed to look on his ancestors' exploits with both nostalgia (which drew in lovers of the Western genre) and scepticism, "which brought in readers like me".

But in this latest rendering of the franchise, the scepticism is in short supply - and so are viewers like me. There are only cliches: lonely Marlboro man cowboys, silent but noble Indians, picturesque horses, golden-hearted whores, bawdy sex scenes and a hat-tip to the values of frontier America. This is more Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman than Deadwood. It may be my jaded palate that found the traditional trappings of a Western so predictable - all those clippity clopping horses endlessly trailing over wide open spaces - as to seem spoof-like.

We are so used to the traditional genres being subverted or re-thought - gay cowboys or Shakespeare set in the projects - when it is simply made straight, join-the-dots cowboys and Indians, it inevitably seems ho-hum. After post-modernist renderings of the Western, dialogue like this just seems too tame. "Call is with Big Horse Scull. They are chasing Kicking Wolf. He stole their horses." Or "Call killed your brother. You kill him."

For all the skinning and raping and shooting there is not that much attitude in Comanche Moon. The Wild West doesn't look that wild any more - half the storyline is about whether Call and Gus will settle down with their girlfriends. Urban manages to deliver all his lines with his mouth closed while Kilmer plays his crazy captain like a pantomime character. Griffiths is cartoonish as the bullying shrew but then she has to deliver lines like this: "What the nigras don't break I can throw at Inish next time he drips tobacco juice on my fine tablecloth."

Instead of sticking to the formula McMurtry needed to say something new.

Inez: "What kind of soldier slouches?"

Gus: "When rangering, posture is not the important thing."

Inez: "What is the important thing?"

Gus: "Guts. Plain guts."

It's a shame the makers of Comanche Moon didn't listen to that advice.

* Comanche Moon debuts tomorrow, 10.10pm, TV3.