Just as TV history is strewn with a frankly alarming number of overlooked sitcoms (like Jennifer Lawrence’s short-lived sitcom “The Bill Engvall Show”), so, too, is it littered with little-known Western series. Have you, for instance, heard of Steven Spielberg’s star-studded Western miniseries “Into the West” (which is impossible to watch today)? How about “Nichols,” the 1970s Western series that starred Margot Kidder? Didn’t think so. Well, now you can add one more to that list with “True Women,” a 1997 CBS show that featured a young Angelina Jolie in her TV debut.
“True Women” was based on Janice Woods Windle’s 1993 novel of the same name, which, according to the author, was part of a trilogy of books that told “the vivid stories of the women in [her] family” that had been “passed down mother to daughter, grandmother to granddaughter, aunt to niece, and even father to daughter, for six generations.” Director Karen Arthur brought those stories to the small screen in a show that essentially told a story that spanned five decades across just two long episodes.
The tales of Windle’s ancestors play out in the tumultuous years between the post-Texas Revolution era through the Civil War and up to the emergence of the women’s suffrage movement. The show focuses on three women — Sarah Ashby McClure (Dana Delany), Euphemia Ashby King (Annabeth Gish), and Georgia Lawshe Woods (Jolie) — and follows them through all manner of hardship, from violence at the hands of native tribes to the loss of husbands. And while this 19th century story of female strength and turmoil earned an Emmy nomination for its musical score, it otherwise went mostly overlooked. Today, it remains an obscure footnote in TV history but thankfully hasn’t become lost media just yet. Still, finding “True Women” isn’t easy.
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True Women is a sweeping Western tale of female endurance — and it’s hard to find
Angelina Jolie’s Georgia Lawshe Woods is seen in closeup as she looks up while laying on the ground in True Women – CBS
Long before Taylor Sheridan was telling multi-generation Western tales with his ever-expanding Dutton family tree, Janice Woods Windle and Christopher Lofton were doing the same with just a single miniseries that originally aired over two nights in May 1997. For a little-known miniseries that was essentially a TV movie split into two parts, “True Women” certainly boasts some outstanding performances, and Angelina Jolie was no exception. As Georgia Lawshe Woods, she does a fantastic job of rendering the pioneer woman’s adult life, which, like her contemporaries, was marked by both incredible hardship and remarkable endurance.
The same year “True Women” aired on CBS, Jolie also appeared in the TV biopic “George Wallace” before starring in another small-screen biopic with “Gia” in 1998. After that, the actor pretty much left television behind as her film career took off, returning only for the 2010 special “Kung Fu Panda Holiday.” That last entry notwithstanding, Jolie actually has a fairly solid, if lean, TV résumé, delivering great performances across all of her small screen projects to date and earning particular praise for her portrayal of Gia Carangi in the 1998 biopic.
“True Women,” by contrast, didn’t really cause enough of a stir to garner the young actor much in terms of praise and has remained overlooked ever since. In fact, trying to find the Western miniseries is pretty tough — at least on any of the well-known streaming platforms. It is streaming on a free streaming service called Mometu, and some YouTube digging might even turn up the full movie, who knows … Otherwise, you can’t even rent “True Women” from any of the usual places, which is yet another reminder of why physical media matters.
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.