Bass Reeves: Not a MAGA Show

When 2023 started, followers of television power player Taylor Sheridan and his ever-growing Yellowstone universe expected that Sheridan’s most well-known show, Yellowstone, and its second spinoff, 1923, would dominate the second half of the year. But due in part to the combined impact of the Hollywood writers and actors strikes, and a strikingly ridiculous public dispute between Sheridan and Yellowstone star Kevin Costner throughout the Spring and Summer, Sheridan’s year instead ended with Lawmen: Bass Reeves, focused on the real-life story of the first black U.S. Deputy Marshal west of the Mississippi River. The final episode of the powerful western-influenced series aired in mid-December.

Originally slated to be a spinoff of 1883, the first Yellowstone prequel that explored how the Dutton family established its massive ranch in Montana, Lawmen: Bass Reeves instead evolved into the kickoff of a new Paramount + series focused on historic law enforcement officials in the American West. This new series, like the new series Sheridan launched this past Summer, Special Op: Lioness, is now separate from his Yellowstone franchise.

However, millions of people engaged with the Yellowstone story and eager to follow anything associated with Sheridan tuned in to learn about Bass Reeves’s truly American story: how Reeves was born into slavery in Arkansas, was forced to fight for the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War, developed a reputation as a sharpshooter, fought his master for his freedom, escaped to the Indian Territories, and was taken in by a native Choctaw woman.

During the time he lived with the Choctaw, Reeves learned the tribe’s language and the folkways of the native tribes in the territories west of Arkansas (now modern-day Oklahoma). When Reeves returns to Arkansas a few years later, his fluency with Native languages and culture, along with his gunslinger skills, makes him a perfect candidate to patrol the territories, as he could befriend the local natives in a way a white Texas Ranger could not.

The real Bass Reeves story has always been part mythological and part mystery. His professional achievement of being one of the most important black law enforcement officials in American history soon after the Civil War, has always been one that more Americans should know. While not confirmed, some historians believe that the Lone Ranger himself, one of the true icons of American western iconography, was based on Reeves and his incredible track record as a lawman. Credited with the arrests of thousands of felons and the killing of at least 14 outlaws without so much as an injury, we now recognize Reeves as one of the most successful U.S. law enforcement officials in Western American history. He also always rode with a Native partner similar to Tonto.

Yet until Sheridan got behind actor and director David Oyelowo’s passion project to bring Reeves’ incredible American story to life, American culture has barely recognized Reeves and his accomplishments. There is no way to compare the universal recognition of the fictional Lone Ranger with what people know about the very real Reeves, which says a lot about race and America’s television history. Thanks to the co-production partnership between Sheridan and Oyelowo, who plays Reeves in the series, Bass Reeves’s story has now finally entered mainstream American popular culture in a major way.

Most of the eight episodes of Lawmen: Bass Reeves focus on the short era between Reconstruction, an often misunderstood period in American history following the Civil War—when the country dismantled legal slavery and began integrating the former confederate States into the United States—and the Jim Crow era that segregated and terrorized black citizens of the American South. Much of the second half of the series hones in on the increasing danger in the late 1800s to the black community in Arkansas where Reeves and his family live.

Instead of focusing on scores of Reeves’s numerous arrests and his law enforcement prowess, the series grows dark and ominous as it builds a very Sheridan-like drama around the mystery and threat to the black community of Arkansas by“Mr. Sundown,” a ghost-like figure who supposedly murders and cannibalizes black men. A direct reference to deadly slave catchers and segregated towns of the South during the late 1800s that prohibited blacks from living there or drove blacks residents away, they blame Mr. Sundown for the growing number of missing black men and teenagers near the Reeves family home.

The Reeves series concludes with a classic Western showdown between Reeves and Mr. Sundown. As it turns out, Mr. Sundown is Esau Pierce, a man Reeves met on a Civil War battlefield nearly 15 years earlier and who is also responsible for killing a Native child that Reeves lived with when he escaped slavery. Thus, the show portrays the two as lifelong enemies and polar opposites: Reeves, a black deputy U.S. Marshal obsessed with law and order, God, morality and goodness; meanwhile, Pierce, a white Texas Ranger, embodies the epitome of evil, an amoral man who enslaves and tortures black men on his land. The contrasts, while a bit cliche, couldn’t be clearer.

Reeves, along with his native partner, Billy Crow, ultimately prevail over Esau and his posse. In the process, Reeves, the former slave, frees the black hostages that Esau kept on his land, providing Reeves with an extra sense of personal triumph and a feeling that he has conquered some of the demons he faced enforcing the law for a country that once enslaved him.

The show ends with Reeves and his family together in a moment of peace and togetherness. American history is clear, however, that the difficult Jim Crow period, which the final episode of the series hints at, is coming for the black citizens of Arkansas (and the rest of the American South) and that the calm the Reeves family feels at the end of the show will not last long.

The overall tone of Lawmen: Bass Reeves is dark and heavy. It portrays an incredibly challenging period in American history and doesn’t shy away from the ugliness in this part of the  American story. It presents slavery, the Civil War, Native-black relations, anti-Native sentiment, violent racism, segregation, and white supremacy in a way not often seen on popular television programs despite their centrality to the country’s development.

Bass Reeves: the Key to Understanding the Duttons?

Many of the final reviews of Lawmen: Bass Reeves over the past couple of weeks featured interviews with Oyelwo, who deserves much of the credit for finally telling the Reeves story on such a highly visible platform. Oyelwo, recently nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Reeves, makes clear in these recent interviews that the success of Yellowstone enabled his Reeves project to finally happen. In some ways, it is a counterintuitive observation.

Originally seen by the mainstream press, wrongly, as a program catering only to the politics and culture of rural white America, the success of the Yellowstone universe has now enabled a critically important story about a historic black figure in American history to come forward. As Oylyelo notes in an interview last week in The Wrap, “one thing that would be universally agreed is that Lawmen: Bass Reeves was not a MAGA show.” No, it certainly is not.

The Reeves series comes at a time when the future of the overall Yellowstone universe is…complicated. The second half of the original show’s Season 5, which will conclude the series, will apparently come out in late 2024, nearly two years after the first half of Season 5 ended. More confusingly, it still remains unclear whether Costner will even appear in it. Meanwhile, Sheridan has announced a new Yellowstone prequel, 1944, and no one knows whether it will serve as a Season 2 for 1923, or whether 1923, starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, will have its own dedicated Season 2. Whether there will be additional episodes of Bass Reeves is also a mystery.

Finally, there is supposed to be 6666, a spinoff series named for the famed Four Sixes Ranch in Texas that appeared in Season 4 of Yellowstone. (Sheridan, in real life, now owns the ranch). While the status of the television series connected to the ranch remains a mystery, the Four Sixes Ranch now features on television as part of a new Sheridan-directed advertisement for Fritos, connecting the popular gas station corn chip with the historic Western lifestyle glamorized by Yellowstone. “Feeding the cowboy spirit since 1932,” the ad exclaims about the thin salty chip.

Had he lived, one could imagine Bass Reeves’s arch enemy,  Esau, chowing down on Fritos on his own ranch. Moments before he and Bass commence their climatic battle in the series’s final episode, he tells Reeves that he is going into the lucrative cow ranching business. Among other things, it’s a subtle way of connecting the program with the overall Yellowstone universe. Of course, Esau never gets to pursue his dreams of raising cattle as the Dutton family does in Montana because Reeves kills him.

But if Esau is the epitome of evil and he aspires for the same livelihood that supports the Dutton family for generations what message, if any, is Sheridan sending in Lawmen: Bass Reeves about the future of the Dutton Yellowstone Ranch and his Yellowstone universe, one of the most important television franchises in recent history. As Bass Reeves would say, in his Southern drawl, only God knows.