After the end of ‘Vikings’, Michael Hirst keeps going for the western story and his next subject is perhaps one of the most famous characters in the American West. Thus, today he has arrived at Movistar Plus + ‘billy the kid‘ (Billy the Kid), a series that takes us through the origins of the legendary outlaw.
Made by Tom Blyth, whom we will see soon in ‘Ballad of songbirds and snakes’, the fiction begins almost as it could not be otherwise: with the protagonist having a tense encounter that we all know how it will end (with one of the two dead). That, however, we will not solve until the end of the first episode, whose central part is dedicated to telling how his family decided to travel to the wild west.
A journey of broken dreams
And it is that what Michael Hirst makes clear from the beginning is that he is not so interested in the adventures of the popular outlaw but how a kid like him becomes what he would become later. This makes the first episodes focus on childhood and adolescence and the tragedies and traumas that marked him.
a trip that it will require some patience Not so much because of this examination of Billy the Kid’s young years, but because of the basic level where everything stays. The development is driven by the predictable and the clichés of the genre, which plays too much against if you are not a particular fan of it.
Nor is it that there is a lack of emotion or some other tense and violent sequence, but these are somewhat relegated to the background in which the series delves into a world of broken dreams (that idyllic west that turns out not to be the land of opportunity) and lawless places with just morals.
a sober drama
Accustomed to more powerful television westerns (‘The Woodpecker’, ‘Godless’), the series is somewhat disappointing in terms of its visuals, which is tied to a conventional realization and a production design resigned to a somewhat tight budget.
Which is a circumstance that is not normally too decisive (it is not in vain that television budgets have begun to rise relatively recently), but together with the other circumstances it makes ‘Billy the kid’ be a lot more discreet than one would like.
Although it has entertaining sections, the tonic is somewhat sober. The pity is that, as interesting as this legendary outlaw is on paper, Michael Hirst fails to take advantage of his full potential, with a somewhat mediocre aim in his portrayal.