Lonesome Dove: where to start reading
Adapts The Lonesome Dove series by Larry McMurtry. Say how far you watched, and pick the book up exactly there.
at Lonesome Dove.
The original miniseries adapts McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 novel across all four parts (about 6.5 hours), from the Hat Creek outfit's decision to drive a stolen herd from Texas to Montana through to the end of that journey. It trims many of the book's subplots and minor characters for time and softens some of its harsher content, but keeps the main plot, relationships, and ending intact. Not covered by this page: Return to Lonesome Dove (CBS, 1993) and the syndicated Lonesome Dove: The Series / The Outlaw Years (1994-96) -- real productions from the same years, but neither is based on a McMurtry novel -- see the note above.
Lonesome Dove (1989) leaves off at the end of book one. Start here:
Streets of Laredo
What the show changed here
- CutDozens of the novel's subplots and minor characters are dropped to fit six hours: the Irish brothers, a locust storm, a bear-and-bull fight, Roscoe's own romance, July's snakebite.
- ChangedThe novel narrates Lorena's captivity and psychological unraveling from inside her own dissociating mind; the miniseries keeps her ordeal more ambiguous and shows her recovering rather than slowly reassembling.
- ChangedGus's feelings for Clara read as more evasive and self-deceiving on the page; the miniseries plays their bond as a wistful, mutually-felt lost romance.
- ChangedThe opening cattle raid into Mexico is morally ambiguous and chaotic in the book; on screen it plays as a straightforward, triumphant romp.
- ChangedThe book ties Call's rejection of Newt to his guilt over failing a woman named Maggie years earlier; the miniseries doesn't dramatize that backstory.
Larry McMurtry published four Lonesome Dove novels, and all four were adapted into miniseries in the same order he wrote them: Lonesome Dove (1985 novel -> 1989 CBS miniseries), Streets of Laredo (1993 novel -> 1995 CBS miniseries), Dead Man's Walk (1995 novel -> 1996 ABC miniseries), and Comanche Moon (1997 novel -> 2008 CBS miniseries). This page's season order follows that same publication-and-broadcast sequence, not the story's own internal timeline. Chronologically, Rangers Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call live through Dead Man's Walk (1840s) first, then Comanche Moon (1850s-60s), then Lonesome Dove (1876), then Streets of Laredo (1890s) -- McMurtry wrote the two prequels a decade after the original novel and its direct sequel. A reader who wants the Rangers' own life story in order, rather than the order McMurtry wrote it and CBS/ABC filmed it, would read/watch Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon first. Two more real, aired productions are not counted as seasons here because neither adapts a McMurtry novel: Return to Lonesome Dove (CBS, November 1993), a sequel miniseries written by TV writer John Wilder -- McMurtry was not involved and was writing his own, unrelated sequel novel (Streets of Laredo) at the same time -- which also recast Woodrow Call (Jon Voight rather than Tommy Lee Jones), so it doesn't square with the real Streets of Laredo novel/miniseries that followed it; and the syndicated Lonesome Dove: The Series (1994), renamed Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years for its second season (1995-96), 43 episodes continuing the story of a grown, recast Newt (Scott Bairstow) after Return to Lonesome Dove -- also with no novel behind it. Separately, Teton Ridge Entertainment acquired the Lonesome Dove film/TV rights in February 2025 and plans to start over from the first novel, but as of this build the project is undated and not yet confirmed as a film or a series.
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