Introducing a weekly guide to viewing options on streaming services.
There are so many options for streaming service subscribers right now that you might spend more time searching for a western than actually watching one. So we decided to introduce a guide to nudge you toward some of the best movies and TV series available on the most popular platforms. Each week, we’ll select one each from five services — and wish you happy viewing. This week, we have rounded up westerns from Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Hulu, Netflix, and Paramount+.

Red Headed Stranger (Amazon Prime)
Bill Witliff wrote and directed this independently produced 1986 western, loosely based on Nelson’s 1975 album of the same title. Reviews were lukewarm, and audiences were scarce. But the movie eventually gained a cult following, and Nelson — who credibly played the lead role of preacher in need of a shot at redemption after killing his treacherous wife (Morgan Fairchild) — managed to make a profit for his investors. More important, he continues to use Luck, the near-Austin western town set constructed for the film, for musical and movie events. Most recently, much of Waiting for the Miracle to Come, an offbeat 2019 fantasy drama starring Nelson and Charlotte Rampling, was filmed there.

Blazing Saddles (HBO Max)
Mel Brooks’ hilarious 1974 western spoof spins the story of Black Bart (Cleavon Little), an “uppity” Black railroad worker who’s saved from the gallows and shipped off to be the sheriff of a frontier town by Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman), a crooked state attorney general. Lamarr figures, rightly, that the small-minded, all-white populace of Rock Ridge will be so hostile to a Black lawman that citizens won’t come to his aid once the shooting starts, making it all the easier for Lamarr and his underlings to chase off the townspeople and seize their land. But Bart gets invaluable assistance from an unlikely source: Jim (Gene Wilder), a.k.a. The Waco Kid, a boozy yet oddly blissful gunslinger who manages, despite his prodigious alcoholic intake, to draw so fast that no one — not Bart, not Lamarr’s henchmen, not even the audience — can see him take his gun out of his holster.

Hondo (Hulu)
John Wayne is said to have ranked this gritty 1953 drama — directed by John Farrow, father of Mia Farrow — as his personal favorite of all his westerns. And while his diehard fans might hold other Wayne classics in higher regard, there’s no denying that Hondo remains one of his most popular movies. (So popular, in fact, that it inspired a short-lived TV western of the same title in 1967 — with Ralph Taeger serving as a game but unsatisfying substitute for The Duke.) As Hondo Lane, an Indian scout, ex-gunfighter, and dispatch rider for the cavalry whose best friend is his mangy dog, Wayne plays the rugged loner as surprisingly sympathetic to the Native American cause, even while protecting a homesteader (Geraldine Page) and her young son (Lee Aaker) from their increasingly (but not unreasonably) hostile Apache neighbors.

Hell or High Water (Netflix)
On one hand, we have two West Texas brothers, Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner Howard (Ben Foster), who are so desperate to save their family farm from foreclosure that they conduct a series of increasingly risky bank robberies. On the other hand, we have Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges), a veteran Texas Ranger, and Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham), his half-Comanche, half-Mexican partner, who are hell-bent on ending the Howards’ crime wave. Working from an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Taylor Sheridan, director David Mackenzie neatly balances sound and fury with heart and soul as he entwines the fates of his four lead characters in this gripping 2016 neo-western.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (Paramount+)
Neither as sentimentally mythic as My Darling Clementine (1946) or as guns-a’blazin’ exciting as Tombstone (1993), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) is a dramatically tense and psychologically intense western, very typical of ’50s cinema — with a surprising amount of screen time devoted to the sadomasochistic relationship between a brazenly suicidal Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas) and Kate Fisher (Jo Van Fleet), his slatternly sometime lover. There are Howard Hawks-style gestures of male bonding on display as director John Sturges charts the relationship between Burt Lancaster’s stern but fair Wyatt Earp and Douglas’ cynical yet loyal anti-hero. (Note how, at one point, Doc pours himself a drink, but Wyatt claims it; a few scenes later, Doc gulps down the whiskey Earp poured for himself.) And there’s something quite affecting about Douglas’ fatalistic tone as Holliday explains why he’s placing his bet on Earp: “If I’m gonna die, at least let me die with the only friend I’ve ever had.”