SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (19)

By: Sajan Saini
September 2, 2021

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite unfinished masterworks, legendary obscurities and cherished almost-weres.

BRISCO COUNTY, SEASONS 2 – ?

When you’re a B-movie star, primetime billing on a show where you talk to your horse may seem a fair enough proposition. But where might that offbeat tale of the West end up, given time?

By 1993, Bruce Campbell had wrapped his fantastically awful Evil Dead run — where he’ll forever retain the honor of “worst self-inflicted amputation performance” in cinematic history. The irreverent Campbell charisma was now recast on Fox TV’s The Adventures of Brisco Country, Jr. as a gentle yet savvy itinerant cowboy: Brisco the lefty gunslinger in tailored tan jacket, out to avenge the murder of his estranged dad, a famed lawman killed by a villainous time traveler (yep). Brisco grew up in 1890s small-town California, but went to Harvard and came home with a law degree. Then he chucked it all to the winds to saddle up as an oddball bounty hunter on the margins of society.

Here was a series set at the turn of the previous century, about an educated man who waxed of the “coming thing” and great technological change, atop a horse. Brisco flirted with prim dames, yet lost his heart to Dixie Cousins, a bodacious saloon singer. He worked for robber barons, but found brotherhood with a burly African-American bounty-hunting rival named Lord Bowler. By the finale, they’d turned secret agents of the President, and rode off for a well-earned hiatus — from which they never came back.

What might have become of this off-kilter show about contradictions and misfits, had it found its audience? Showrunner Carleton Cuse said Brisco strived to be “just short of over-the-top.” That liminal space between knowing and innocent camp not only gave breathing room to try anything under the sun (pirates raiding stagecoaches, proto-Elvis pelvic-swingin’ sheriff); it cultivated characters. Brisco gave us a silly world, filled with people we wanted to take seriously.

Cuse planned to make Brisco a sheriff next, saddling ol’ pointy-chin with responsibilities one step closer to the lantern-jaw mold of his Dad. But Brisco may also have given us a ’90s take on the enterprising Black man and self-made woman. Lord Bowler blew past his initial caricature as second banana, into a mythic tracker with a goofy laugh who remodeled his San Francisco mansion (bounties pay!) and dreamt of a winery in Napa. And Dixie transformed overnight from a sultry siren into a hard-luck survivor rebuilding her life.

For all the clichés about episodic TV going nowhere, Brisco’s characters changed at a brisk gallop. Season two would have reunited us with Dixie, returned from China (long story, featuring a baby emperor); would she retire the sexy songstress act, maybe buy a saloon in Brisco’s township? Would Bowler have returned as a groundbreaking Black lawman, then settle in Napa with his love Lenore, only to reteam with Brisco to investigate bizarro alien abductions of Jersey cows, or maybe square off against a vision-questin’ Geronimo pardnered with a gunslingin’ Frankenstein?

In its preoccupation with genre mash-up, Brisco mixed ’n’ matched the DNA of the Western with sci-fi’s charge to envision new societies and pluralistic possibilities. There were blind spots: every Asian was a railway laborer or ninja, and Native Americans were AWOL altogether. Might that SF impulse have led maverick Brisco — man of letters and fists — to reckon with Manifest Destiny, tongue still in cheek? Would he continue to live between worlds, or end up making a choice?

There’s so much we could’ve explored, in the mischievous guise of genres colliding. At least Brisco took down that time traveler and admitted his love to Dixie, before cashing in. As a card shark complimented him early on: “You cheated me fair and square.”

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SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (19)

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