There was a time when the Western was old-school gunslingers and train robbers resigned to cinematic history. Then, Taylor Sheridan showed up with a freshly steamed Stetson, put Kevin Costner as the patriarchal figure of a ranch full of heavily armed cowboys, and enough morally compromised characters to make the entire American frontier look like one very large writers' room.
It was still the Wild West, but not as we know it. Then Landman came along, and Sheridan confirmed he truly had the Midas touch for turning a modern Western stories into TV (and literal) gold.
But long before John Dutton was sending people to the train station or Billy Bob Thornton was digging for oil, filmmakers were dragging the genre out of Monument Valley and into border towns, reservations, suburbs, oil fields, and the dusty corners of contemporary America. The cowboy became a cartel hitman, a wildlife tracker, a sheriff, a bank robber, a drug lord, and occasionally just a bloke trying to keep his ranch.
So with season 3 of Landman landing sometime in 2027, we thought it was high time to get into some of the modern classics that have come to define the genre across both the small and big screen. So here it is: the best neo-westerns to get into in 2026.
13. Justified (2010–2015)
Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood) may have made an entire career in the West, but many feel like U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens is the role he was born to play.
Sent back to his hometown in Kentucky after a shooting in Miami, he spends the next six seasons dealing with criminals, old friends, family grudges, and Walton Goggins' magnificent Boyd Crowder.
It's based on American author Elmore Leonard’s original material, so the dialogue is as sharp as a Sheriff’s badge. Though Raylan and Boyd often spend entire scenes circling each other verbally before someone reaches for a weapon.
All six seasons streaming on Stan, Disney+, Paramount+, and BINGE.
12. Longmire (2012–2017)
Before Yellowstone, there was Longmire. Based on Craig Johnson's novels, the neo-western series was A&E's highest-rated original drama when the network cancelled it after three seasons. It was still relatively unknown then. At least, it didn’t have the same reach after Netflix picked it up and gave it another run. A rare happy ending, then.
There's also some local pride for this one for the Australians in the room: the show’s gruff, widowed sheriff Walt Longmire is played by Australian actor Robert Taylor, best known until then as Agent Jones in The Matrix. Katee Sackhoff and Lou Diamond Phillips co-star.
All six seasons now streaming on HBO Max.
11. Eddington (2025)
Revered horror director Ari Aster (Midsommar, Hereditary) skipped the run-up when he launched into A24’s Eddington, taking the storied genre and dropping it into the most unlikely scenarios: May 2020.
People either loved it or hated it. Perhaps it suffered from a COVID hangover the world is yet to shake. But on paper (and in practice) it’s a stellar look into a small town and its enduring disputes. A Sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) at war with the local mayor (Pedro Pascal), with Emma Stone, Austin Butler, and Yellowstone's own Luke Grimes completing a stacked cast. It’s probably best to watch it and pick a side.
Streaming on Netflix in Australia.
10. Outer Range (2022–2024)
Josh Brolin (True Grit, No Country for Old Men) plays a Wyoming rancher whose problems begin in recognisable Western territory: land, cattle, neighbours, family and a rival rancher trying to push him off his property. Then he finds a bottomless black hole in his west pasture, as if the Yellowstone writers opted for a less-than-subtle Twilight Zone spin-off. I mean that as a compliment.
Two seasons and 15 episodes later, Amazon pulled the plug in 2024, which is a shame, given that I thought season 2 was the much stronger release of the two. With 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, I certainly wasn’t alone.
Seasons 1–2 streaming on Prime Video.
9. Logan (2017)
Before you jump in my inbox about how Logan is a superhero movie, I encourage you to hear my reasoning. It's the X-Men film that ended up as a Western, and director James Mangold wasn't exactly subtle about borrowing from the genre's greatest hits.
Set in 2029, the mutants are mostly gone, and a battered Wolverine is driving limos near the Mexican border while looking after a fading Professor X (Patrick Stewart) when a young girl (Dafne Keen) turns up with claws of her own.
Mangold uses the 1953 flick Shane as the template for much of this film, and what follows is essentially a Western road movie: an ageing gunslinger, a dying mentor, a mysterious child, a long journey across the American West and one final confrontation with the men who have come to take them down.
Strip away the adamantium claws, and you've still got one of the oldest stories in the Western canon. It was also the first live-action superhero film nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars.
Streaming on Disney+.
8. Dark Winds (2022–present)
The “Too long; didn’t read” version of this description tells you Robert Redford and Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin both signed on as executive producers, and all four seasons so far have scored a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. You may as well load it up right now.
Set on the Navajo Nation in the 1970s and adapted from Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn & Chee novels, Dark Winds shares some DNA with Yellowstone, but swaps ranch dynasties and billionaire land grabs for a more slow-burn noir mystery series that places the audience deep into Navajo culture.
There are shades of True Detective and Mare of Easttown in the mix, but the setting gives Dark Winds a distinctly Western identity of its own. Season 5 is already confirmed for 2027.
All four seasons streaming on SBS and Netflix.
7. Wind River (2017)
The final part of what Taylor Sheridan calls his American frontier trilogy (after Sicario and Hell or High Water), and the one he directed himself, Wind River sees Marvel alum Jeremy Renner as a wildlife tracker who finds a young woman's body in the snow on Wyoming's Wind River Reservation. Elizabeth Olsen (also MCU royalty) is the out-of-depth FBI agent sent to investigate.
It’s peak Sheridan in its storytelling and pacing, with the crime retold through a flashback reconstruction before the investigation becomes a reckoning.
Sheridan won the Un Certain Regard directing prize at Cannes. The closing title card about missing Indigenous women hits harder than anything in the film.
Streaming on Stan.
6. Fargo (2014–present)
If the Coen brothers' Fargo (1996) proved that the American Midwest could be as strange and violent as any frontier, Noah Hawley's television version realised it could sustain an entire anthology of modern Western morality tales.
Every season is different, with a changing cast, characters, and settings, though the central thread is ordinary people making rather poor choices and the inevitable chaos that ensues.
Across five seasons, appearances from Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, Kirsten Dunst, Ewan McGregor, Chris Rock, Jesse Plemons, Jon Hamm, Patrick Wilson, Ted Danson, Jason Schwartzman, Ben Whishaw, Jessie Buckley, Bob Odenkirk, Glenn Howerton, Keegan-Michael Key, and Jordan Peele ensure Fargo is still one of the most consistent shows on TV.
All five seasons streaming on Prime Video, Stan, and SBS On Demand.
5. Yellowstone (2018–2024)
The one that started it all (at least for Taylor Sheridan's estimated US$800 million TV empire, that is) and changed what was expected of a neo-western series forever.
Kevin Costner plays John Dutton, patriarch of the Dutton family and owner of the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch, who spends five seasons fighting developers, politicians, neighbouring ranchers, the reservation, environmentalists and (with limited success) his own children. It’s essentially King Lear set in a Country music video.
Costner won a Golden Globe in 2023 before he left halfway through the final season. Sheridan even cast himself as horse trader Travis, and the universe has since expanded through 1883, 1923, and further spin-offs, turning Sheridan's version of the modern frontier into its own television ecosystem.
All five seasons streaming on Stan.
4. Sicario (2015)
Taylor Sheridan was still acting when he quit Sons of Anarchy and wrote Sicario, supposedly sitting on the idea for years before he left the show to travel and research the story. Ten years later, I’m still convinced it’s the best thing he's written.
Emily Blunt plays Kate Macer, an idealistic FBI agent recruited into a shadowy task force targeting a Mexican cartel alongside Josh Brolin's Matt Graver and Benicio del Toro’s Alejandro, the modern gunslinger who knows why they're really there.
It also sees Denis Villeneuve’s early lens, long before Arrival and the soon-to-be Dune trilogy. The film earned three Oscar nominations, including Roger Deakins for cinematography, Jóhann Jóhannsson for original score and sound editing. I wish I could put this one higher.
Streaming on Stan.
3. Breaking Bad (2008–2013)
It's a little older than the rest of this list, and completely far removed from the typical calling card of the Western genre, modern or otherwise. But writer Vince Gilligan has always called it a Western, so if it counts, it simply has to place on the podium.
Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad begins with a man standing in the New Mexico desert in his underwear, pointing a gun at the horizon, and ends with a shootout. There’s a lot of what many consider to be the greatest television ever written sandwiched in between, but the basic Western arc is incredibly hard to miss. Only this time, the cowboy is a suburban chemistry teacher, and the cattle ranch is a meth empire.
Across five seasons, it won 16 Emmys, including four for Bryan Cranston and three for Aaron Paul. Guinness World Records also named it the highest-rated TV series of all time in 2013; The New York Times backed that up last month. If you somehow still haven't seen it, this is your sign.
All five seasons streaming on Stan.
2. Hell or High Water (2016)
For me, Hell or High Water is the undisputed perfect modern Western, and one of Taylor Sheridan’s most impressive pieces of work.
Two brothers (played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster) are forced to rob banks across West Texas to save the family ranch from foreclosure, with Jeff Bridges leading the charge to hunt the boys down.
It’s richly layered, at times incredibly funny, and Sheridan manages to fill each scene with tiny pieces of what audiences understood about the dying American frontier, slowly making way for the new era. There’s also a lung-busting crescendo of a shootout in the final moments of the film that’s near-impossible to look away from.
Streaming on Netflix and Stan, and free on SBS On Demand.
1. No Country For Old Men (2007)
Every list of modern Westerns eventually runs into the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, and every film on this list owes something to the Coen brothers' take on Cormac McCarthy.
Josh Brolin (for the third time on this list) plays Llewelyn Moss, a welder who stumbles on a drug deal gone wrong and $2 million in cash, with Javier Bardem's terrifying Anton Chigurh in constant pursuit, coming to retrieve it (sporting the worst haircut in cinema history). Tommy Lee Jones' tired sheriff is always somewhere a step behind.
No Country for Old Men won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and Bardem entered the mainstream for his near-mythological performance, which saw him become the first Spanish actor to win an acting Oscar. Nearly two decades on, it's still the benchmark from which everything else is measured.
Fun fact: Brolin got the part with an audition tape shot by Robert Rodriguez and directed by Quentin Tarantino on the set of Grindhouse.
Streaming on Paramount+ and Stan.