Brisco County, Jr.: How the West was weird (video).

There was a brief, shining moment in the early ’90s when primetime telly let a wise-cracking Harvard man on a horse lasso time travel, flirt shamelessly with a saloon singer, and occasionally invent the future between gunfights. The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. rode in with a wink, a whoop, and a shiny golden MacGuffin the size of a cannonball—and if that sounds like your sort of Saturday-morning serial poured into a Friday night slot, then saddle up, partner. Brisco is the rare beast: a proper “weird western,” equal parts six-gun and steampunk, with a dollop of sci-fi and enough deadpan silliness to make even the most po-faced desperado spit out his chaw laughing.

Bruce Campbell—patron saint of chin-led heroics—plays Brisco as the Old West’s most affable renaissance man: a Harvard-educated lawyer who’d rather out-think a gunfight, but will happily leap off a balcony if it gets a bigger cheer. He’s hired by a gaggle of robber barons to round up John Bly and his gang, which is your basic Western premise until someone wheels on the Orb, a gleaming gizmo from tomorrow that can heal, harm, and generally behave like the universe’s most temperamental paperweight. The show calls all this “The Coming Thing,” which is both a mission statement and a running gag. If you spot a prototype motorbike, a rocket on rail tracks, or a zeppelin drifting over mesa country, don’t worry: you haven’t nodded off and woken in The League of Extraordinary Cowpokes. That’s just Tuesday in Brisco-land.

Turn to the supporting cast and the smile gets wider. Julius Carry’s Lord Bowler starts as a grouchy rival bounty hunter and ends up Brisco’s brother-in-arms; their double-act has the warm, knockabout energy of two lads who’ve shared too many campfires and not enough pay cheques. Christian Clemenson’s Socrates Poole is the fussiest brief west of the Mississippi, a man who can turn “per diem” into a punchline. John Astin, forever Gomez in our hearts, pops up as Professor Wickwire, the sort of delighted tinkerer who’ll invent a submarine if you only ask nicely and bring biscuits. Kelly Rutherford’s Dixie Cousins is a saloon singer who can out-con a con, out-shoot a cheat, and croon while doing both. Top it with Billy Drago’s Bly—dandy, demon, and, depending on the episode, possibly not from around these parts—and you’ve got a rogues’ gallery that understands the first rule of pulp: be larger than life, then order seconds.

Tonally, the series lives in that lovely, precarious space “just under over-the-top.” Jokes fly, but no one turns and winks at the camera unless the camera winks first. Action is brisk, punch-ups are balletic, and the cliffhangers are written with the glee of kids building ramps for their toy horses. Brisco is forever sauntering into a scenario that looks like a straight Western—stagecoach robbery, land baron shenanigans, showdown at dusk—only for the plot to twist itself into a Jules Verne knot. It’s as if The Wild Wild West eloped with Indiana Jones and they honeymooned in a Mark Twain footnote. When the Orb gets properly chatty, the show even flirts with flat-out science fiction: time travel, moral consequence, destiny with a capital “D.” Somehow it still finds room for a sheriff who channels Elvis and a horse called Comet who might be the cleverest member of the ensemble. (Yes, the horse gags land. Yes, you’ll cheer for a hoof stamp. We all do. This is the way.)

If you’re wondering why a series this confident, colourful, and flat-out fun only ran for 27 episodes, welcome to the haunted boneyard of Friday-night scheduling. Brisco launched strong, then watched the numbers wander off like cattle through a broken fence while its lead-out show, a little paranormal thing with torches and trench coats, hoovered up the cult-TV oxygen. The tragedy is that Brisco was already the best sort of cult show: instantly quotable, structurally playful, quietly progressive (the West here is refreshingly more diverse than most dust-and-denim outings), and obsessed—in a very SF way—with the hinge of history. Set in 1893—a neat 100 years before broadcast—it’s forever sniffing the breeze for electricity, motorcars, fingerprints, recorded sound, the whole jangling carnival of modernity. That “Coming Thing” isn’t just a gag; it’s theme and thesis. The future is arriving whether the West fancies it or not. Brisco, the cheerful pragmatist, will help it unpack.

There’s a lovely craft story humming beneath the varnish, too. You can feel the show’s movie-serial DNA in the act titles and cliffhangers, and hear it in Randy Edelman’s galloping theme—a proper “ride into glory” earworm that escaped the corral and went to work on actual sports broadcasts. The Warner western backlot gets a final star turn, the stunt and horse work is properly tasty, and the props department appears to have raided both the past and the future. It’s the sort of physical, tactile production that reminds you how charming analogue fantasy can be when everyone’s committed and the greasepaint is still drying as they call “Action!”

Was it perfect? Of course not. Some episodes lean harder into broad comedy; others drop the Orb for a week and go full cowboy. But that’s part of the charm: Brisco is a pick ’n’ mix where the liquorice whips sit happily next to the sherbet. One week you’re saving a town of mail-order brides from the Swill Brothers; the next, you’re in court delivering a proto-CSI slide-show. If an invention or idea appears and then vanishes like a desert mirage—well, so do watering holes and honest politicians out there. The point is the adventure, not the user manual.

Campbell, meanwhile, is the glue. He sells the punchlines, sells the punches, and—most crucially—sells the optimism. Brisco is an unapologetic dreamer who thinks problems can be solved, villains redeemed (or at least outfoxed), and tomorrow improved with a decent spanner and a better melody. That hopeful, forward-leaning spirit is exactly why the series has aged like fine sarsaparilla. In an era where the Weird West has since ridden again—yes, we’re glancing at you, Firefly, assorted comics, and the modern steampunk festival circuit—Brisco remains the rare show that’s giddy about progress without sneering at the past. It’s sentimental without being soppy, clever without being smug, and happy to take the mick out of itself so long as it crosses the finish line with panache.

Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we love this kind of genre magpie: a show that pilfers from sci-fi, Westerns, serials, and screwball romance, then stitches it together with confidence and a bit of brass. If you’ve never watched it, the complete run is compact enough to binge over a couple of indulgent weekends; if you have, you already know the particular joy of returning to Bowler’s withering asides, Dixie’s eyebrow acting, Socrates’ bureaucratic doom, Wickwire’s delighted “aha!”, and Brisco’s unflappable grin as the next daft contraption trundles on. And the Orb? It’s a perfect metaphor for the series: radiant, mysterious, sometimes ridiculous, and far more powerful than anyone gave it credit for at the time.

So yes, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. was cancelled. But like any good legend, it didn’t ride off so much as camp down in our collective memory and keep telling tall tales around the fire. The West got weird, the future arrived early, and a Harvard cowboy made it look easy. Not a bad legacy for a one-season wonder. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to oil the zeppelin and teach the horse a new trick. The Coming Thing waits for no one.