Lord, Miller, and writer Michelle Morgan are making a new Western comedy for IMDb TV

Western will center on Polly, a 19th century woman who finds herself catfished out to the Old West, a century-plus before anyone started saying "catfishing"

By William Hughes  |  March 11, 2022 | 1:58am
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Lord, Miller, and writer Michelle Morgan are making a new Western comedy for IMDb TV
Left: Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SCAD), Right: Michelle Morgan (Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images for IMDb)

Somebody lock up Sam Elliott’s six shooter, and get ready to soothe him with a heaping jarful of Pace Picante sauce: It sounds like someone’s about to poke a little fun at the venerable institution of the American Western. Specifically, THR reports that Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (your one-stop shop for irreverent takes on cop movies, toy movies, TV shows about hormonal clones of history’s most famous figures, half a Star Wars, and more) have lined up a new Western project with writer Michelle Morgan, called, well… Western.

Here’s the logline, which suggests that Miller, Lord, and Morgan may, in fact, choose to poke a little fun at the conventions of the world-weary oater. (Please also consider this your regular reminder that any time you talk about or write about a Western, you get to say “oater” exactly once; please don’t neglect this golden opportunity to employ one of our silliest extant genre words.)

Western is set in the 1800s and revolves around a high-society young woman who travels West in search of a husband only to discover that she has been catfished by a teenage boy. Now stranded, Polly and the town’s other inhabitants, must find their place in the ever-changing new world where they confront and defy all expectations society has of them along the way.

Tone on this sort of thing is always hard to read, but the use of the term “catfishing,” some century-plus ahead of its invention, suggests that Western might not be the straight-laced take on the genre our father’s would have liked!

Western is headed toward Amazon’s IMDb TV, with Morgan set to perform primary writing duties under Miller and Lord’s production aegis. The duo previously produced on The Afterparty (with Miller handling writing duties), as well as that Clone High revival that’s currently aimed at HBO Max. Morgan’s previous credits include It Happened In L.A. and Girl Most Likely.

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