The English Review

I wanted to like The English, the new western series from British writer/director Hugo Blick, which premieres on Prime Video on November 11. After all, I enjoy the show’s two stars – Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer – and I’m always down for a western. But, after watching the six episodes of the show provided for critics, well, I honestly wish I’d never turned it on in the first place.

So much of what makes a series work is the tone within the story. And, with something that can be as polarizing as a western*, tone is particularly important. Is this going to be the old-school, serious drama? The Tarantino-esque blood and gore fest with humor laced throughout? Should we see Blunt’s Cornelia Locke and Spencer’s Eli Whipp as heroes, forced to do bad things to met out revenge and justice for their wrongs, or are they more anti-heroes, not better or worse than the men (and women) who have wronged them and get on their bad side throughout the course of the story? The problem with The English is that Black never picks a tone. From scene to scene, it changes. When faced with truly awful adversaries, we’re meant to feel for our hero and cheer them on. When faced with foppish adversaries – who they dispatch in the same way they dispatch the more odious characters – we’re supposed to laugh at the villain and still cheer their death.

*With our modern understanding of the role white colonizers played in the decimation of the indigenous peoples of North America – as well as around the world – the traditional trope of “cowboys and Indians” isn’t a viable storytelling device (and rightly so, since those stories were often severely one-sided and treated the indigenous characters as an afterthought at best or the villain/joke at worst). Here, there’s an attempt to balance the scales in a way those older films and television shows failed to do, but the series is still pretty hazy in its understanding of indigenous culture in light of the storyteller at work here.

Part of the problem comes from the disjointed storytelling choices Blick makes throughout the series. We know Cornelia wants to take revenge on someone for their role in the death of her son, however she’s almost constantly faced with other challenges or threats that overcome that need. Once we are shown a bit of her past (in a sequence I was particularly annoyed – and initially confused – by), we’re nearly halfway through the series. The same goes for Eli’s arc. We understand his goal – he repeats it often enough – but we don’t really gain an understanding of just what he’s doing to achieve it. Much of the series is told in vignettes – we see our pair meet and face off with their first set of villains. Then they travel together to their next villains. Then they split and each face additional villains. There’s an almost video game quality to the story – you follow the character on their journey until they reach the level boss, who they must defeat to get to the next story.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this type of storytelling on the face of things. The problem comes when you don’t bother doing the legwork with the character development to make us care about these characters and their fate. The villains come off as particularly cartoonish because we, largely, know next to nothing about them – save for whatever their immediate want is and how they are going to achieve that from besting our hero. But the real issue – and the major tonal one – comes when we’re faced with our hero fighting off the villain. We don’t know the silly bad guy, but we also know next to nothing about our heroes. We know a sketchy biography – which the character has told us – but nothing about their internal work. Blunt does try to imbue her character with some emotional heft, but Spencer is a cypher throughout the series. But both are playing the story straight. They’re up against some lovely British actors who are playing for the balcony, but Blunt and Spencer are taking the scenes deadly seriously. It’s a strange tonal dissonance that pulls you completely out of the story and leads to some major confusion regarding just what we should be thinking.

This is particularly jarring when we’re presented with Cornelia’s backstory, which, naturally, includes an instance of sexual violence. Blunt does some great work showing us how this moment impacts Cornelia. But the assailant is a mustache-twirling villain who feels out of place in the severity of the sequence. And that’s the feeling of the series across the board. The violence – and there’s a lot of violence, blood, and body parts – is often so over the top that it’s hard to take it seriously, yet our leads are doing just that. Had Blick picked one tone or the other, this likely would have been a much kinder review. But I spent the bulk of the series trying to get a handle on just what it was trying to show me from its point of view that I wasn’t able to appreciate the positives within the story.

Now, I’ve spent most of this review talking about the Cornelia and Eli side of things – and the pair are the central characters. But they aren’t the only major arcs within the show. No, there’s an entire side plot about Cornelia’s former fiancé who wanted to make his way in the West and bought land, only to fall in with folks who are stealing cattle from a fiery Austrian immigrant whose husband died in mysterious circumstances. And no, it’s not a particularly well set-up arc, it seemingly comes out of nowhere (and we don’t understand the connection to Cornelia until we’ve spent a chunk of time with the characters), and honestly, I found myself more interested in this subplot than the main action. Most of that was thanks to Valeria Pachner’s great performance as the widow, but it’s also because this section of the story has a consistent tone throughout. We know these guys are bad news, we know something shady is afoot, and we get the connection between all the characters. If Blick had made this the central plot of the story, well, it would be pretty interesting.

So, is The English worth a look? Honestly, no, as you can find much better westerns out there to watch that don’t require so much mental math to make sense of them.

The English premieres on Prime Video on Friday, November 11. All six episodes of the series were provided for review.