How the Urban Action of ‘Training Day’ Inspired a New Taylor Sheridan Period Western
When showrunner Chad Feehan talked to IndieWire about the influences behind his new Paramount+ series “Lawmen: Bass Reeves,” he mentioned a few that were unsurprising given the show’s Western backdrop and visceral sense of authenticity. “‘The Revenant‘ was one that I thought about a lot,” he said, noting that film’s combination of brutality and glorification, “and we found several books by [historical fiction writer] Sidney Thompson that were paramount to the crafting of the narrative.” There was another key reference point, however, set in a very different milieu than the post-Civil War Texas of “Bass Reeves”: the 2001 urban cop film “Training Day.”
The relevance to “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” of Antoine Fuqua’s propulsive tale of a young cop’s trial by fire over 24 hours offers several insights into what makes Feehan’s Western (the latest production overseen by the genre’s present-day master, executive producer Taylor Sheridan) such a unique and satisfying series. The first comes from the film’s tone, which like “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” combines gritty realism and specificity of setting with a slightly heightened sense of melodrama. The adaptation of the true story of a slave who ultimately becomes one of the first black U.S. Deputy Marshals is filled with instructive details of time and place that make it an enlightening history lesson, but these factual components coexist with some very effective old-school Hollywood myth-making; as played by David Oyelowo, Reeves is complex and troubled, but also a larger than life hero given the same sense of respect and valorization as the white cowboys of the Western’s peak period of popularity in the 1950s.
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While “Training Day” informs the series as a whole in terms of tone, it has a more specific and direct influence on one particular episode. In “Part II,” Reeves is indoctrinated into the world of law enforcement by an erratic and morally suspect peace officer played by Dennis Quaid; the dynamic between the inexperienced, naive Reeves and Quaid’s jaded, dangerous mentor figure plays like an Old West variation on the Ethan Hawke-Denzel Washington relationship in Fuqua’s film. Herein lies the most interesting thing about the structure of “Lawmen: Bass Reeves”: It’s neither a series of self-contained stories nor purely serialized, but a sort of hybrid that Sheehan arrived at as the proper way to tell Reeves’ multi-faceted story.
In its first three episodes, “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” essentially reboots each time, telling a fully realized story that under normal circumstances could easily justify a self-contained feature film. “Part I” covers Reeves’ enslavement and escape to freedom in an episode that’s chilling and rousing in equal measures, while “Part II” takes on a completely different flavor as a sort of “Training Day”-esque anti-buddy film. “Part III” finds Reeves in a new position of authority and embarks on his first mission in charge, and the subsequent episodes shift into a more continuous register that resembles the serialized nature of other Taylor Sheridan shows.
According to Feehan, the bifurcated shape of the season was an organic outgrowth of his desire to cover the wide array of dramatic incidents in Reeves’ life. Finding the right shape “wasn’t easy,” he said. “There were seminal moments that I knew I wanted to build the narrative around. I felt that Bass’ experience during the Civil War and his time in Indian territory were the most exciting inciting incidents I’d ever seen for a character. Obviously, I wanted to pay homage to the fact that he was a scout and posse man for a time before he became a marshal. Then I wanted to do a sort of ‘first day on the job’ episode.”
Despite managing to cover so many disparate phases of Reeves’ career, Feehan would like to return to the character for more seasons if “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” is successful. “There is definitely meat on the bone,” he said. “We simply ran out of time. But if the audience has an appetite for it, there are other stories from Bass’ life that I would love to tell.”
“Lawmen: Bass Reeves” airs new episodes weekly on Paramount+.
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