There is a challenge, amounting virtually to a moral responsibility, when making a drama set in the time of the American enslavement of Black people. That is: to find a way of bringing home its fundamental horror to an audience now long accustomed to depictions of it.
Lawmen: Bass Reeves, which begins in Arkansas in 1862, amid the American civil war, finds it in a scene set round a card table. Bass (David Oyelowo, who co-produces as well as stars) and his enslaver, George Reeves (Shea Whigham), are playing for his freedom. This chance, this flip of a card, is Bass’s reward for acquitting himself heroically in the Confederate army, to which he was effectively conscripted when George enlisted.
The scene combines terrible tension – Bass is shaking and almost weeping – and an even more terrible evocation of what it means for another person to have dominion over you. It captures how appallingly unjust and inhumane that is and makes vivid the reality – it’s based on a true story – of living in a country built on that extraordinary foundation.
The outcome of that game means that Bass must flee the state in fear of his life, leaving his wife, Jennie (Lauren E Banks, who has such presence that she is almost hard to watch), and seeking refuge in Native American territory. He is taken in by Sara (Margot Bingham), a Seminole woman whose husband was killed in the war, and her son, Curtis (Riley Looc). The Seminole nation “never surrendered, never made a worthless treaty”, and so is still – technically, at least – free.
But Lawmen is a drama designed to interrogate at every turn what liberty means for colonised or enslaved people. Bass lives there peacefully for a few years, picking up the language and working occasionally as a translator between storekeepers and visitors to the local trading post. There he meets a former soldier, now a prisoner, from his Confederate days and learns that the Union won – that emancipation has formally arrived. Hard on the heels come events that prove how worthless formal triumphs can be. Bass must move on again.
A decade or so later, as a father of many and a farmer beset by bad harvests, he shows us how poverty makes a man unfree, regardless of the heavily caveated gains of Reconstruction. When a US marshal, Sherrill Lynn (Dennis Quaid), offers him a job helping to track down Native American outlaws, he must take it for his family’s sake.
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It is the beginning of what became Bass’s life’s work. In 1875, he was made a deputy chief marshal for western Arkansas by a judge, Isaac Parker (Donald Sutherland), and served for more than 30 years, arresting at least 3,000 people. One of them was his son, who was charged with murder.
So, Oyelowo has much to get his teeth into. He is wonderful at layering fury, despair, hope and misery over Bass’s core – which is, as Lynn puts it after watching him pray over a victim’s body while Lynn strips the killers’ corpses, that of “the most earnest man I have ever met”.
The western is such a storied form that there are many familiar tropes. Bass escapes hounds by swimming across a river; endless grizzled men squint at the sun. At times, it threatens to tip Lawmen into humourless pastiche – particularly given that the script generally hews to a terse tradition (“He died brave.” “He lived brave”). But the rare point of view and the care taken with the story, to say nothing of its basis in real-life achievements, save it.
It also finds room for expansion. Jennie, playing the piano to her daughter, tells her that she was taught by her mistress as an expression of the great lady’s benevolence. “The piano was hers, but the music was all mine. Always have something that’s yours, baby.” It is a particularly female piece of wisdom.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is space made to enjoy Quaid, whose gift for lazy charm combined with latent threat has become more concentrated with age and works perfectly here. “It’s hard for a man to put fear and hate behind him,” says Bass when faced with Lynn’s hardened brutality. “Aww hell, Bass,” says Lynn, leaning towards him with that smile. “I ain’t even trying.”
Based on Sidney Thompson’s trilogy of historical novels and written mainly by Chad Feehan (Ray Donovan, Banshee), Lawmen was originally intended to be a spin-off of 1883, itself a spin-off of Yellowstone, but now serves as the opener of an anthology series about figures attempting to impose order on a lawless country in thrall to the idea of manifest destiny. On this evidence, that is something to look forward to.