When the Well Runs Dry: The Story America Tells Now

The American Myth Turns: From Stewardship to Extraction

From my observation, America’s storytelling in movies and TV is a reflection of the myths the culture leans on to understand itself. For decades, the stories told in movies and television were built on abundance — wide skies, endless land, and the belief that the world could be tended, repaired, or redeemed. That emotional architecture shaped everything from Bonanza to Little House on the Prairie, and from Gunsmoke to The Waltons — the civic‑optimist dramas that once defined the medium.

But over time, a slow erosion of the old optimism began to show. The stories that once carried the promise of renewal now feel marked by strain — a sense that the emotional reserves that sustained those earlier myths have run low. The frontier hasn’t disappeared; it has simply hardened. What was once a landscape of possibility has become a terrain shaped by scarcity, pressure, and the quiet recognition that the world can no longer be endlessly repaired.

My long‑standing love of cinema and my interest in myth are what brought me to this observation. The stories we tell don’t just entertain; they reveal the emotional infrastructure a culture relies on to make sense of itself. And as I watched American television shift over the past few years, the pattern became increasingly apparent. The old civic myths — the ones built on abundance, repair, and communal resilience — have thinned, giving way to narratives shaped by pressure, depletion, and the uneasy recognition that the world no longer replenishes itself on cue. This turn in storytelling isn’t incidental; it marks a deeper transformation in the myth America now leans on to understand its place in a changing world.

Every myth has a lifecycle. The frontier myth of abundance — the one that promised renewal, repair, and endless second chances — carried America for more than a century. But its emotional scaffolding is collapsing, and our stories are quietly telling us so. The new grammar is extraction: a world running out of land, time, patience, and faith in the old covenant between people and place.

This isn’t just a shift in genre; it’s a shift in worldview. The optimism that once animated our civic stories has thinned into something more brittle, more anxious, more aware of limits. Our television myths have become diagnostic tools, revealing the emotional geology beneath the culture: the strain, the depletion, the sense that the well is no longer bottomless.

What comes after extraction is still unwritten. But naming the turn matters. Mapping it matters. This blog is one tile in a larger atlas — a way of marking the moment when the American story pivoted, when the frontier stopped being a promise and became a question. The next myth will emerge from that question, and the stories we tell now are already sketching its outline.

The American story doesn’t jump straight from the civic frontier myths of Bonanza to the extraction‑era world of Yellowstone; it moves through a long, slow mutation of its own mythic code. After the early frontier myth of 1900–1959 hardened into a national imagination of possibility, television translated it into the civic Western of the Bonanza era (1959–1973), where the West became a stage for fairness, decency, and communal responsibility. . This vision wasn’t limited to the Cartwrights; series like The Big Valley and the later seasons of Gunsmoke carried the same civic grammar — communities held together by moral authority, neighborly obligation, and the belief that justice could still be negotiated rather than enforced.That civic optimism softened further in the pastoral myth of The Waltons and Little House on the Prarie (1972–1983), where the frontier was no longer a place to conquer but a memory to preserve — a moral landscape held together by family and care. But by the early 1980s, the seams were showing. Hill Street Blues and its peers (1981–1993) revealed institutions fraying under their own weight, introducing a world where complexity overwhelmed clarity and civic faith began to erode. Into that vacuum rushed the dominance myth of Dallas and Dynasty (1978–1991), where power replaced virtue and the frontier reappeared not as land but as corporate territory — a place to control, defend, and exploit. These eras form the tectonic plates beneath our current extraction worldview, each one shifting the emotional grammar of American myth a little further from shared possibility toward competitive survival.

As the civic and pastoral myths thinned out and the dominance era took hold, something fundamental in the American imagination snapped — and the shift was clearest in how women were written. The female moral center that anchored Bonanza, The Waltons, and Little House on the Prairie couldn’t survive the institutional fracture of the 1980s or the power‑first logic of Dallas and Dynasty. Once virtue stopped being the cultural currency, the stabilizing female archetype had nothing left to stabilize. What emerged instead was a new emotional grammar: women as volatility, wound, ambition, or strategic force — a transformation that paved the way for the antihero era, where every character, male or female, would be built from fracture rather than civic purpose.

Once the stabilizing female archetype collapsed, the antihero era rushed in to fill the vacuum. From 1999 to 2013, shows like The Sopranos, The Shield, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad built their worlds around characters whose moral centers had imploded — and the women around them reflected that implosion in different registers. Carmela Soprano became the conscience trapped inside the machine; Skyler White of became the resistor blamed for resisting; Wendy Byrde of Ozark (arriving slightly later) became the strategist shaped by the same ruthless logic as the men. Female characters were no longer moral anchors but pressure points, amplifiers, or counterforces inside systems already in decay. And by the time the culture reached the extraction myth of 2018–present, the transformation was complete: women like Beth Dutton in Yellowstone or the corporate operatives in Landman embody the raw emotional grammar of the era — volatility, resilience, trauma, and tactical intelligence forged in a world where everything is scarce and every relationship is a negotiation. In this landscape, the frontier isn’t a place to build a life; it’s a zone to survive, defend, or strip for value. The antihero era didn’t just lead to extraction — it trained the audience to understand it.

The extraction myth is the narrative operating system that emerges once the antihero era exhausts itself. If the antihero dramas of 1999–2013 taught audiences to live inside moral collapse, the extraction myth of 2018–present teaches them to live inside systemic collapse. Prestige dramas like Yellowstone, Landman, Mayor of Kingstown, and even adjacent series like Succession or True Detective: Night Country share the same emotional grammar: the world is in managed decline, institutions are hollow, and value comes from whatever you can seize, defend, or extract before it disappears. In this worldview, land becomes leverage, relationships become transactions, and identity becomes a survival strategy. The frontier isn’t a horizon anymore — it’s a resource zone. And that shift marks where we are now: a culture narrating itself through scarcity, volatility, and the belief that the future is something to endure rather than build.

The cultural moment we’re living through echoes another great rupture: the late 1500s, when Europe’s old medieval certainties collapsed under the pressures of exploration, extraction, religious fracture, and new representational technologies. The Baroque Baroque - Wikipedia rose from that turbulence not as decoration but as a survival architecture — a way to create coherence, awe, and emotional order in a world that no longer felt stable. Our extraction myth plays a similar role today. Prestige dramas like Yellowstone and Landman narrate a world defined by scarcity, volatility, and the exhaustion of civic promises, turning systemic decline into story, identity, and worldview. And just as the Baroque once transformed chaos into immersive emotional experience, we may be approaching a new version of that pattern — an emerging A.I.‑Baroque, where meaning is rebuilt through orchestrated worlds, layered perspectives, and narrative systems that feel more like environments than stories. If the extraction myth is the worldview of decline, the A.I.‑Baroque may become the worldview of reassembly: a cultural attempt to build emotional order out of informational overwhelm, and perhaps the first mythic architecture capable of holding the complexity of the age we’re entering.

In the long arc from frontier to extraction, we may finally be standing at the threshold of a new Baroque — a moment when a culture, overwhelmed by its own complexity, begins the work of building meaning again.

PJ Westwood

Appendix: A Mythic Viewing Guide

From civic optimism to extraction logic, the emotional grammar of American television has shifted. What follows is a guide to its terrain

This guide focuses on popular cinema and television — the stories that reached wide audiences and helped define the emotional grammar of their eras. It isn’t meant to be exhaustive, and there are always works that resist or invert the dominant patterns. But the examples gathered here trace the broad mythic currents that shaped how America imagined itself across the last century.

1. Frontier Myth (1900–1959)

Emotional grammar: expansion, self‑reliance, moral clarity

Annotation: Stories built on open horizons and simple moral binaries — the world is vast, danger is external, and character is proven through action.

• Stagecoach (1939)

• High Noon (1952)

• Shane (1953)

• The Lone Ranger (TV, 1949–1957)

• Gunsmoke (TV, 1955–1975)

2. Civic Western / Bonanza Era (1959–1973)

Emotional grammar: fairness, decency, community stewardship

Annotation: The frontier becomes a community. Conflicts are resolved through dialogue, fairness, and the belief that institutions can be guided toward justice.

• Bonanza (TV, 1959–1973)

• The Rifleman (TV, 1958–1963)

• To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

• The Andy Griffith Show (TV, 1960–1968)

• The Big Country (1958)

3. Pastoral Civic Myth (1972–1983)

Emotional grammar: family cohesion, sincerity, small‑town stability

Annotation: A retreat from national turbulence into intimate, domestic worlds where emotional sincerity and moral continuity hold families together.

• The Waltons (TV, 1972–1981)

• Little House on the Prairie (TV, 1974–1983)

• Norma Rae (1979)

• Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)

• Breaking Away (1979)

4. Institutional Fracture (1981–1993)

Emotional grammar: distrust, bureaucratic decay, systems failing good people

Annotation: Institutions crack. Heroes confront corruption, cover‑ups, and bureaucracies that no longer function — or function against them.

• Hill Street Blues (TV, 1981–1987)

• Serpico (1973) — early but foundational

• All the President’s Men (1976) — mythic precursor

• The Verdict (1982)

• The X‑Files (TV, 1993–2002) — late but emblematic

5. Dominance Myth (1978–1991)

Emotional grammar: power as virtue, status as identity, winning as morality

Annotation: Wealth, ambition, and spectacle define the era. Success becomes the moral center, and characters rise or fall by their ability to dominate.

• Dallas (TV, 1978–1991)

• Dynasty (TV, 1981–1989)

• Wall Street (1987)

• Scarface (1983)

• Working Girl (1988)

6. Antihero Descent (1999–2013)

Emotional grammar: fracture, appetite, self‑preservation

Annotation: The center collapses inward. Characters navigate moral implosion, personal hunger, and the consequences of systems already in decay.

• The Sopranos (TV, 1999–2007)

• The Shield (TV, 2002–2008)

• Mad Men (TV, 2007–2015)

• Breaking Bad (TV, 2008–2013)

• There Will Be Blood (2007)

• No Country for Old Men (2007)

7. Extraction Myth (2018–present)

Emotional grammar: scarcity, volatility, resource logic

Annotation: The world is in managed decline. Characters survive by leveraging land, relationships, and institutions as resources to extract before they disappear.

• Yellowstone (TV, 2018–present)

• Landman (TV, 2024–present)

• Mayor of Kingstown (TV, 2021–present)

• Sicario (2015) — early but tonally perfect

• Hell or High Water (2016)

• Wind River (2017)

8. Possible Next Era — A.I.‑Baroque

Emotional grammar: reassembly, orchestration, layered perspective

Annotation: Early signals of a new mythic mode — stories built from complexity, multiplicity, and immersive emotional architecture rather than linear narrative.

• Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

• Annihilation (2018)

• Devs (TV, 2020)

• The OA (TV, 2016–2019)

• Spider‑Verse films (2018, 2023