WHAT I'M WATCHING

I’ve always been a fan of good westerns. My father was a fan of western history and had in his library several 19th century First Editions, including “The Life of Colonel David Crockett, As Told By Himself”, copyright 1836. For as much as I have learned about the legendary Davy Crockett in the years since I first read that at age 10, he did a lot of the legend-building himself, which can be found in the book.

But it started me looking for the real stories of the West. That same year I read Davy Crockett’s autobiography, which may have actually been written by himself, we were down visiting family in New Mexico, and my father introduced me to a very old man, who claimed to have know Billy The Kid when he was a young boy in Lincoln County. He was the first person I ever heard say that Pat Garrett didn’t kill Billy, but faked his death for him so he could start anew, since they had been friends together as cattle rustlers in the Jesse Evans Gang.

That’s a persistent story, or variations of it, though most western historians now believe that Garrett did indeed kill the 21-year old outlaw who named himself William H. Bonney, there being no honor among thieves, with Billy standing between Garret’s old life and the new opportunities that had presented themselves as Lincoln County New Mexico became “civilized” in the years after the Lincoln County War. Killing Billy cemented Garrett’s reputation as a lawman and a member of the society that had come to be as the frontier became less wild, while allowing him to lose his other history. If you think about it, that’s a pretty American story.

There have been a lot of books and movies about Billy The Kid. I’ve always like Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist take on the story, “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” made back in 1973.

But I really like the new MGM+ series, “Billy The Kid,” of which Season Two is currently playing. I ran across it two weeks ago by a comment from a friend. The First Season made last year is available on streaming and I downloaded the 8 episodes and have been watching them. I’m also picking up the Season Two episodes as they come on broadcast.

What I particularly like is this series is about as close to the truth about Billy the Kid as anyone has done. The story begins at the beginning, in New York City, with young Henry McCarty the 10 year old son of Irish immigrants Catherine and Patrick McCarty, who decided to try their luck on the frontier, traveling to the collection of huts and dirt known as Coffeyville, Kansas, where Patrick dies of causes unknown - I liked that as the first point of fact, since no one knows what happened to him.

Catherine then marries William Henry Harrison Antrim, who turns out not to be such a God-fearing man as he presents. Orphaned at 15, Henry Antrim becomes known as Kid Antrim after he burglarizes a Chinese laundry to get money for food, is arrested and breaks out of jail to enter the life of a fugitive in which he eventually takes the alias William H. Bonney before his friend and fellow cattle rustler Pat Garrett names him “Billy the Kid” because he’s so famous.

The series is really well made. It presents a more truthful depiction of the actual western frontier and the social, economic and political forces that shaped it than the more mythological stories of the Wild West have done in the past century of Hollywood filmmaking.

Creator Michael Hirst is known for being a writer on “Vikings,” “the Tudors,” and “Elizabeth,” all series I watched and liked. He’ had a lifelong interest in the tale of Billy the Kid, and this is his first series as showrunner. It’s done up in Alberta, which does a good stand-in for Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Mexico in the 1870s and 80s.

Tom Blyth, who plays Billy, actually looks like the few photos ever taken of the outlaw, and he does the role with restraint. Everyone else is good, too. The directing pays homage to the classic genre while bringing its own depiction of the western.

I like it a lot. If you like a good historical drama, if you’re a fan of the western, I think you will too.

It’s not that much of an escape from today, since the problems of America have been around for a long time.

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