Breaking Bad… a Western? Believe it or not, it belongs in the canon, as do the three other titles on this list of stories that have helped redefine the modern Western.
These two films and two series took the genre to places far outside the norm, but they remain surprisingly rooted in the same traditions. Here, we break them down.
Paris, Texas
The Tale: Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) walks out of the desert like a ghost who’s forgotten how to haunt. He doesn’t speak and barely seems to exist. Gradually reunited with his young son, Hunter (Hunter Carson), and good-hearted brother Walt (Dean Stockwell), Travis embarks on an aching journey to reclaim some version of a life he destroyed years earlier.
Their travels lead them to Houston and to Jane (Nastassja Kinski), the woman Travis loved and lost, now working at an adult peep show club. There are no shoot-outs, no chases, just conversations that land harder than gunfire. The film lets regret and tenderness linger in every beautiful shot.
Everett Collection
Cowboy Cred: This 1984 drama is a Western with the violence turned inward. Travis is a classic loner — part Ethan Edwards from The Searchers, part Shane — except his frontier is emotional rather than geographical.
The desert, the long roads, Travis’ final act of self-sacrifice: It’s all there, along with a sublime score by Ry Cooder and a screenplay by that incomparable chronicler of the West Sam Shepard. Paris, Texas proves you don’t need six-shooters to tell a Western story.
Breaking Bad
The Tale: Walter White (played by four-time Emmy winner Bryan Cranston) turns terminal illness into an excuse for empire-building, transforming from a meek high school chemistry teacher into the feared meth-producing drug kingpin known as Heisenberg.
Set against the deserts of New Mexico, this landmark television series from Vince Gilligan charts White’s moral disintegration with pitiless clarity, alongside Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), the former student and partner in crime who becomes the show’s conscience and great casualty.
Ursula Coyote / AMC / Everett Collection
Cowboy Cred: Breaking Bad…a Western?! Just ask Gilligan, who once said, “I wasn’t planning on doing a contemporary Western, but that’s what Breaking Bad turned into.” In his 2008–13 series, Gilligan embraced the idea of Walter White as “a man alone against the horizon” in the best sense of the Old West. Walt is a self-made frontier outlaw legend.
The series exposes the cost of ambition and the lie at the heart of the myth. White is the ultimate antihero; later, the arrival of ultra-cool übervillain Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) in Season 3 presented him with the formidable rival he deserved.
Kill Bill
The Tale: A former assassin known only as the Bride (Uma Thurman, above) wakes from a coma after the murder of her intended and everybody else in the wedding party and gets right to work crossing names off a very personal to-do list. Volume 1 (2003) barrels ahead with operatic bloodshed as she inches closer to Bill (David Carradine), her former lover who orchestrated the hit. Volume 2 (2004) eases off the gas, digging into backstory.
Together, they form a riveting revenge epic that hops genres and continents. By the time the Bride reaches the end of her hit list — fellow killers Budd (Michael Madsen), Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) and, ultimately, Bill — vengeance has given way to something trickier: a kind of vicious closure.
Miramax / Everett Collection
Cowboy Cred: Writer-director Quentin Tarantino has long boasted of wearing his Sergio Leone love on his sleeve—and here, he even borrows some Ennio Morricone soundtrack cues. The Bride is a lone avenger, squaring accounts like a gunslinger with a razor-sharp single-edge Japanese sword and precious little mercy.
Volume 2 especially plays like a spaghetti Western. It’s Once Upon a Time in the West — just with an almost cartoonish amount of arterial blood spray.
American Primeval
Justin Lubin / Netflix
The Tale: Set in the lawless 1850s American West, American Primeval drops viewers into a frontier that is still very much unfinished. The series follows Sara Rowell (Betty Gilpin), a mother on the run with her young son, as she crosses contested territory where survival is a daily negotiation.
Her path soon intersects with hardened frontiersmen, Indigenous tribes, Mormon settlers and opportunists, including Isaac Reed (Taylor Kitsch), a damaged, dangerous guide whose moral compass spins wildly depending on the moment he finds himself in.
There are no safe towns, no clear heroes and no illusion that civilization will arrive anytime soon. Every alliance is temporary, every kindness transactional and violence is the norm in this 2025 Netflix hit.
Cowboy Cred: This is as raw as a contemporary Western can get. If classic genre entries romanticized what it was like to settle down on the plains, American Primeval shows the blood price it required. It carries the grim fatalism of The Revenant and the moral chaos of Deadwood, rejecting nostalgia outright. The land isn’t something to be tamed; it actively resists, punishes and remembers.
In that sense, it’s closer to the historical frontier than anything John Ford ever put on screen, with all due respect to Mr. Ford, and it serves as a stark reminder that the West was never born clean, only rewritten that way later.
TV Guide Magazine’s Cowboys: From the Wild West to the New West Special Issue is available for order online now at Cowboys.TVGM2026.com, and for purchase on newsstands nationwide.