“1923” Is a Love-Hate Western—and a Fairytale About Modernity

I don’t remember the last time a show had me swinging so hard between admiration and exasperation. “1923” is, for me, a top-tier love-hate watch. One minute I’m nodding along at its sly, tactile portraits of a world tipping into modern life; the next I’m rolling my eyes at contrivances, sainted heroes, and villains painted with a trowel. Maybe that’s why I kept watching—because beneath the gun smoke and grandeur is a series trying to decide whether it’s a gritty chronicle of change or a myth told around a campfire. Most nights, it’s both.

The seductive hum of new machines

The show’s quietest triumph is how it textures the arrival of technology. Season 1 gives us parking spaces, refrigerators, washing machines; Season 2 answers with telephones, new roads, even proto-resort planning. They aren’t just background props. The series uses them to stage arguments about what “progress” does to people.

Two conversations crystallize this better than any montage. Banner Creighton tells his wife that all their life’s back-breaking labor can finally bend toward leisure—not merely because they’ve found money, but because money can now buy time-saving machines. It’s a sentiment that could have wandered in from How We Got to Now: technology as a multiplier that reshapes the hours of a day and the posture of a life.

Then Pete Plenty Clouds counters that same optimism from another angle: in trading so eagerly for the new, entire communities misplaced skills that once made them sovereign over their world. You feel the ache in that idea. “1923” holds both truths in the frame at once. The series becomes a split-screen: a hymn to ingenious tools and a warning about what gets hollowed out while we’re dazzled by them.

Violence: unsanitized, sometimes undisciplined

I’ve seen the criticism. Much of it is warranted. The violence can be relentless, and there are places where the camera’s appetite outpaces the story’s need. But I’m also glad the show doesn’t sand the edges off history. The frontier—and the early 20th-century industries that replaced it—chewed through bodies. Immigrants, Indigenous communities, ranch hands, and women were pressed between systems built to ignore their pain. When “1923” refuses to look away, character arcs harden into something you can believe in.

That said, there’s a line between honest depiction and cartoon sadism. Giving Timothy Dalton’s character his particular, lurid fetishes tips the scale. I get the instinct to make a villain unforgettable, but evil doesn’t need to sprint at 500 mph to read as evil. Game of Thrones taught this lesson with Meryn Trant; “1923” occasionally forgets it. Creighton could have turned on him for a dozen more grounded reasons.

Pawns at the edges

Another consistent frustration: the bystanders. Too often the show treats peripheral characters like medieval squires happy to die for their lord on a moment’s notice. There’s the road-stop warning that goes unheeded, the helpful citizen whose logic evaporates because the plot needs a push. Alexandra in particular is written, at times, as if common sense is a luxury item—choosing drama over believable choices even when a single sentence to allies would spare everyone a lot of blood and gasoline. These moments don’t sink the show, but they do rattle it.

Coincidence, winking and otherwise

The series even jokes about its own coincidences—Mamie Fossett practically says the quiet part out loud. And yes, fate does love the Duttons. The timing of vehicles, the miraculous proximity of tracks and travelers, the choreographed near-misses: it’s a lot. You either buy the mythic current that carries these people or you don’t. On bad days it feels like narrative duct tape. On good days it reads like destiny.

Spencer Dutton, or: learning to watch a myth

Here’s the adjustment that unlocked the finale for me: if you watch “1923” as a modern prestige drama, Spencer Dutton’s arc feels implausible. If you watch it like a Western-flavored Marvel story, it sings. The show doesn’t hide what it’s doing—every hardship he survives, every whispered legend from other characters, is forging a folk hero. By the time the finale arrives, you’re not asking, “How can he do that?” You’re thinking, “Of course he can—this is the lesson the tale has been teaching.” Spencer is Batman in a Stetson, a knight with a bolt-action creed.

I normally bounce off stories that power-up their leads into invulnerability, but here the mythmaking is the point. Which brings me to the lens that, for me, reconciles the show’s extremes.

Read it as a fairytale—and it clicks

“1923,” like “1883” and “Yellowstone,” reads best as a fairytale told with grit under its nails.

• The hero is infallible, almost mythical, in fight and survival.
• Moral lines are boldly inked: good and evil often wear their colors on their sleeves.
• The motifs are incantations—honor, land, bloodlines, rugged self-reliance, legacy.
• Symbols recur: the gifting of knives, the land as blood and identity, ceremony as binding law.
• Endings aim for resolution and the triumph of good, with a moral tucked beneath: civilization refines and corrupts in the same breath.

Seen that way, the coincidences aren’t glitches; they’re the grammar of myth. Fairytales comfort because they clarify—values are agreed upon, debts are paid, monsters are slain. You get to inhabit a legend from Alexandra’s vantage, to fall in love with a man written to be larger than drought or distance, and to feel the satisfying thud of obstacles cleared.

Where the spell thins: women’s stories at the service of men

My biggest critique overlaps with my gripes about “Yellowstone” and “1883.” The women are written as formidable, but their arcs often bow to the men’s destinies.

• Elsa’s blaze of life exists largely to make her father’s journey meaningful.
• Cara runs a ranch with iron in her spine—but mostly in Jacob’s shadow, and chiefly as a bridge to Spencer’s return.
• Beth is the franchise’s nerve and dagger, yet her story keeps re-tightening around her father’s legacy.
• Alexandra’s odyssey is romantic and riveting, but the endpoint—deliver a son to secure the male line—feels preordained.

These are not small roles, and the actresses make them roar. But the architecture still routes the electricity toward the men. It’s a missed opportunity in a saga obsessed with inheritance; power is a legacy too, and the women keep paying in capital without holding the deed.

The Indigenous storyline: necessary, moving—and isolated

I was grateful “1923” carved out space for a Native American storyline that isn’t merely an ornament to frontier nostalgia. The residential school sequences, in particular, refuse to blink. They’re some of the show’s most responsible and necessary hours.

Even so, the way that plotline sits next to the Dutton saga can feel emotionally quarantined. We witness horrific events, but we don’t always get the same intimacy with Teonna Rainwater’s inner life that the Duttons receive as a matter of course. At times it plays like a historical insert—vital, powerful, but not fully woven into the human fabric of the series. Suffering needs personhood beside it to land at its full weight.

What the series gets right, and why it sticks

When “1923” is good, it’s transporting. It captures a hinge-moment in the American West when technology redrew the possibilities of a day and the map of a county. It honors the hard, untelevised work of ranching without pretending the open range was ever a meritocracy. It lets romance be grand without smirking at it. And it argues, sometimes eloquently, that progress always extracts a price—time saved on the washboard, skills lost in the bargain.

Even the parts that bug me are symptoms of a coherent choice. If you’re telling a fairytale about modernity, you need a knight, a dragon, and a kingdom worth saving. Spencer obliges. The villains oblige. The land, always, obliges.

So…love or hate?

Both. I loved the texture of change: the clatter of new roads, the gossip of switched-on telephones, the subtle ways machines reshaped marriages and ambitions. I respected the willingness to show violence as a structure, not a jump scare. I liked the big, operatic romance and the promise that competence and courage can still matter when the ground is moving.

I hated the lazy NPCs at the margins, the overcranked depravity when a steadier hand would do, the coin-flip coincidences that yank you out of the scene. I’m impatient with a franchise that keeps outfitting women for war and then writing them as conveyances for a male legacy. And I wish the Indigenous arc were sewn tighter into the show’s beating heart.

Hopes for whatever comes next

Maybe Taylor Sheridan “gets” it next time; maybe he already does and he’s simply writing the story he wants to tell, with myth doing the heavy lifting where realism would stall. Either way, I’ll be there—for the machines that whisper promises and threats, for the land that insists on being a character, and for the messy, earnest attempt to braid legend with history.

Because for all my grumbling, “1923” left me with something rare: the feeling that I’d watched a tale about how a country grows up—and what it forgets to carry with it when it packs the truck.