I enjoyed watching Westerns. It included a temporal duality: a time long ago (the 19th century Western US) and a recent time ago (the 50s and 60s when these movies were made). So much has changed since both thens, but the absolute distance in years isn’t great: a film made in the 1940s from almost equidistant from me in 2025 as it was to its original time period of the 1870s. Stuff changes.

But I enjoyed the drama without judgement, a different way of seeing beauty and imagining an emptiness that is surely long gone. And the gunfire, while frequent, wasn’t authentic in its violence. I preferred that.

But good Westerns, complex Westerns were hard to find on Netflix or Amazon and I didn’t have cable. The classic spaghetti Westerns weren’t easily available to stream (I thought). But the genre stuck with me and my imagination.

I’m not sure where exactly I heard the bass recorder that is the signature sound of the Mandalorian. Probably in the background of a family party. But it caught my attention and I took a nibble.

After watching a few episodes and getting totally hooked, I saw the connection between the Westerns and Star Wars. Yes, the landscape and the lack or brutal violence (sure, lots of shooting, but no one bleeds). But the emptiness of the scenery, the thrill of moving through space, and I learned, the challenging morality of doing the right thing after an Empire has fallen.

So I’ve become hooked on Star Wars. I’ve started watching all the series in order, which is a delightful escape. Anything not live action is a cartoon, which is OK by me as I love animation. (Probably a topic for a different blog post: why I love animated TV.) So to sleep at night, I watch Anakin or Obi-wan fight some bad guys.

I’ve never cared much for the light sabre battles or scenes of them crawling through ventilation shafts. The movies are packed with that type of ‘action’. It doesn’t hold my attention as much as watching the world that is created, and what the universe could look and sound like.

Some of the most fun scenes in Star Wars take place on Coruscant, the capital planet. It contains depictions of furturistic cities: lots of neon, vertical instead of horizonal, a spave for everyone, including robots. And so much steel, not concrete. And one thrilling part, let’s be honest, is that they never have parking issues in Star Wars.

These scenes are gritty and colorful. They tickled my imagination more than others (Andor especially, though Book of Bobba Fett too) and left me wanting more. At which point I saw the overlap between the darker, grittier sides of Star Wars and another favorite of mine, cyberpunk.

I’ve read plenty of the classic sci-fi cyberpunk books and loved them. So it felt worth it to take a detour from the many hours of Star Wars I still have left to consume and take in a little futuristic grit in “Altered Carbon”. A delight, if way too violent for my tastes. And soon Neuomancer will hit AppleTv and I’ll have the perfect sweet spot for winter: a new series of one of my favorite books combined with many hours or Star Wars still to explore.

And I finally did find some Westerns. On a free streaming platform, Tubi. So I still return to the place where my TV journey’s all began. Out West, with black hats and horses.