Into the West

TNT’s sprawling Into the West miniseries—we mean, “television event”—does everything within its power to replicate the crowd-pleasin’ vibe of Dances With Wolves and other edge-free Cowboy'n'Injun tales. Each of the six, two-hour installments is packed to the hilt with panoramic vistas and snow-capped hills, each accompanied by the requisite swelling orchestration. Heavily Oscar’ed purveyor of all things Western, Steven Spielberg (AI, War of the Worlds), is involved as executive producer, so you know that lines like “everywhere I looked, I saw treasures of immeasurable beauty” will be served up with a painfully earnest twinkle in the eye. But just when you’re ready to radio for the cliché police—“I need backup! The American West is being used as a metaphor for personal exploration!”—the flick serves up a two-fer of dynamic suspense sequences, one in which a Lakota tribe lures a herd of buffalo to its death and another where the story’s protagonist comes face-to-face with a googly-eyed wackjob (Gary Busey, playing way against type). In short, Into the West is just like HBO’s Deadwood—minus the hookers, gore, rich characterizations, and 47,698 expletives.