There’s gold in them hills! Black Hills, Dakota, specifically. This mid-00s HBO series transports viewers back to the lawless town of Deadwood during the gold rush in the 1870s; a place of hard-drinking, gambling and fighting, hosting all kinds of magnificent bastards. Take Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), or Francis Wolcott (​Garret Dillahunt): truly great TV villains. It’s also one of the most sweariest TV shows of all time – someone once calculated that the word “fuck” is said 43 times in the first hour of the show, and continues with an f-bomb on average 1.56 times every minute.

Former Skins star Jack O’Connell was about as far removed from Bristol’s nu-rave scene as possible in this 2007 series about Roy Goode, a young outlaw in 1884, who ends up in a New Mexico town populated almost entirely by women. There’s more prestige British talent in the shape of Michelle Dockery, who plays Alice, a widowed ranch-owner who becomes Roy’s love interest. What’s interesting about Godless is that it switches up the traditionally male-dominated genre of the Western to be more female-fronted, and with it, shoots apart tropes and cliches more generally associated with other production set in this old-fashioned era.

From the writer of The Revenant, Netflix’s American Primeval – set during the 1857 Utah War – was always going to be a savage, no-holds-barred tale, especially when the inspiration for this series was taken from a real-life massacre. Taylor Kitsch and Betty Gilpin star as Utah-dwelling folk pulled into the violent clash of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,who, with the Utah Territorial Militia and some Paiute, murdered 120 people on the Baker–Fancher wagon train. Playing out over just six episodes, we previously recommended steering clear of a binge-watch on this one, due to its hyper-violent scenes that play out “like experiencing a nightmare” – and we’d still stand by that today.

This one’s a neo-Western, set in the Appalachian mountains area of eastern Kentucky, where Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), a deputy U.S. Marshal, delivers his own unique brand of justice to the local criminals. Described as an “old West lawman living in modern times”, the first of the six series – which premiered in 2010 – focuses on Givens trying to stamp out a crime family dynasty. In series two, The White Lotus’ Walton Goggins pops up in one of the roles that set him on his path to acting world domination: as arson-loving, born-again Christian career criminal, Boyd Crowder.

A dead body found in a backyard kicks off this neo-Western series, focused on a conservation warden called Joe Pickett who moves with his wife and kids to Saddlestring, Wyoming (also close by to genre-favourite Yellowstone National Park, geography fans). He soon uncovers a conspiracy involving a nefarious crime family, which touches on scandals that have plagued the Wild West since the first rush: the power grabs for oil and other lucrative natural resources. It’s a nice touch having a protagonist who’s protecting wildlife and nature as the battles of Western life, both historic and present day, continue around.

Emily Blunt is a tour de force in this 2022 mini-series, in which she plays Lady Cornelia Locke, who comes to the West in 1890 looking for revenge on the man she believes killed her son. Crossing the mid-West, she falls in with a Pawnee Nation man, Eli (Chaske Spencer) on his way to claim his land for his service in the US army, but what they discover is increasingly a fledgling nation founded on even more violence, racism, revenge and blood. The gripping series is a sobering reminder that the birth of the United States is intrinsically tied to the systematic annihilation of Native Americans and the destruction of their cultures.

If you grew up in the ‘90s, this theme tune blaring out from Channel 4 on a Sunday morning will be instantly recognisable to you: a long-running drama (nine series, actually) about pioneer family Ma and Pa Ingalls growing up with their young family in Minnesota. Based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, based on her own childhood, what appeared at first to be a genteel, charming story about young sisters giggling around the prairies actually covered some pretty hard-hitting issues for the 1970s, when it was mainly filmed. Alcoholism, child abuse, adoption, leukaemia and menopause were just some of the topics the show featured, never shying away from picturing exactly how tough and brutal life would have been for the pioneers back then.