Hugo Blick wrote and directed every episode of The English, a six-part limited series that premiered on BBC Two in 2022 and streamed on Amazon Prime Video in the United States. Emily Blunt stars as Lady Cornelia Locke, an Englishwoman who arrives in the American West in 1890 seeking revenge for the death of her son. Chaske Spencer plays Eli Whipp, a Pawnee ex-cavalry scout pursuing his own claim to land he was promised. Their paths collide in the opening episode, and the rest of the series follows their journey together across a frontier of violence, corruption, and colonial exploitation.
The show drew strong interest on the strength of Blunt’s casting and the visual ambition of the trailers. Critical response was broadly positive but with significant caveats about the show’s narrative complexity, which some found richly layered and others found unnecessarily confusing.
Blunt, Spencer, and the Weight of the Frontier
Emily Blunt is riveting as Cornelia. She plays a woman who has crossed an ocean to kill the man responsible for her son’s death, and Blunt refuses to soften Cornelia’s rage with the kind of vulnerability that period dramas often impose on their female leads. Cornelia is capable of violence, comfortable with deception, and driven by a fury that the show never asks the audience to forgive or condemn. Blunt brings a coiled intensity to the role that makes Cornelia feel dangerous even in her quieter moments.
Chaske Spencer matches Blunt with a performance of controlled stillness. Eli is a man between worlds, a Pawnee who served the U.S. cavalry and now wants nothing more than the land he was promised in return. Spencer plays Eli’s restraint as a survival strategy, a man who has learned that showing too much in any direction gets you killed in this version of America. The chemistry between Blunt and Spencer is the show’s emotional core, and their evolving partnership, built on mutual need rather than romance, gives the series a relationship dynamic that feels refreshingly original for the western genre.
The cinematography is breathtaking. Blick and his team shoot the American frontier with a painter’s eye for light, space, and the relationship between human figures and the open spaces they move through. The wide shots of prairie and mountain have a beauty that the show consciously sets against the ugliness of what’s happening within them. This isn’t a West that’s been prettied up for consumption. It’s gorgeous and murderous in equal measure, and the visual tension between beauty and brutality runs through every episode.
The show’s engagement with colonialism and the treatment of Indigenous peoples is more substantive than most westerns attempt. Eli’s story isn’t a subplot or a sidebar. It’s central to the show’s argument about who the American frontier belonged to and what was done to take it. The English treats this history with seriousness and specificity, and Spencer’s performance ensures that the political dimensions of the story never overwhelm its human ones.
The Labyrinth of Plot
The English’s narrative structure is its most polarizing element. Blick constructs the story across multiple timelines, with revelations about the past arriving in fragments that the viewer must assemble. The connections between characters, events, and locations are deliberately obscured in early episodes and gradually clarified as the series progresses. When this technique works, it produces genuine surprise and the pleasure of seeing a complex puzzle snap into place. When it doesn’t, it creates confusion that disrupts emotional engagement.
Several episodes require the kind of concentrated attention that television doesn’t always reward. Characters are introduced without context, scenes cut between timelines without clear markers, and motivations that seem simple are revealed to be entangled with events the audience hasn’t witnessed yet. Some viewers thrived on this density, treating each episode as a puzzle to be worked. Others felt that the show’s narrative obscurity was a barrier to connecting with its characters and their stakes.
The supporting cast is large, and not every character receives enough development to justify their screen time. Some figures who prove important to the plot’s resolution feel underwritten when they appear, making their eventual significance feel more like a structural surprise than an emotional one. The show trusts its audience to hold a lot of narrative threads simultaneously, and that trust isn’t always warranted.
The violence, while thematically purposeful, is also graphic and frequent. The English doesn’t romanticize frontier violence, but it also doesn’t shy away from depicting it in detail. Some viewers found this commitment to showing the reality of the era powerful. Others felt that the show occasionally lingered on brutality beyond what the story required.
Rewriting the Western
The English belongs to the tradition of revisionist westerns that use the genre’s conventions to interrogate the myths that those conventions were built on. Cornelia’s quest for justice and Eli’s quest for land are both stories about people confronting a system that was designed to destroy them, and the show argues that the violence of the American frontier wasn’t an aberration but a feature. This is a western that takes the perspective of the people the traditional western either ignored or vilified, and that shift in viewpoint gives familiar genre elements a different, more uncomfortable charge.
Blick’s ambition sometimes exceeds his storytelling clarity, but the ambition itself is impressive and sincere.
Should You Watch The English?
If you’re drawn to westerns that complicate the genre, if Emily Blunt in a revenge role sounds appealing, or if you appreciate television that demands active viewing, The English offers a visually spectacular and thematically ambitious experience. The performances alone justify the time, and the show’s willingness to center Indigenous perspectives within a western framework gives it a relevance that the genre often lacks.
Skip it if complex, non-linear storytelling frustrates rather than engages you. The English requires patience and attention, and it doesn’t provide the kind of clear narrative momentum that many viewers rely on. If you found yourself lost in the first two episodes and not enjoying the disorientation, the remaining four are unlikely to convert you.
The Verdict on The English
The English is a bold, beautiful, and sometimes bewildering revisionist western that aims higher than most entries in the genre. Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer deliver performances that anchor the show’s considerable ambitions, the cinematography is among the best on television, and the thematic engagement with colonialism and violence gives the series genuine weight. Its narrative complexity is both its distinction and its limitation, producing a show that rewards attentive viewing while occasionally losing its audience in its own structure. For viewers willing to work for it, The English offers a western unlike any other.