CHILI SHOWDOWN AT HIGH NOON: Deadwood and Justified Lock Spurs in a Dead Heat While Yellowstone Waits Outside the Saloon

Holster your ladles, cowpokes. A new cook-off just kicked open the saloon doors, and the question on the menu is the biggest in the genre: which is the best Western TV series ever served? Four dishes sit on the pass, dusty, smoky, soaked in whiskey and grudges. The judges have taken their first bite. And... (theatrical pause, tumbleweed rolls by)... they cannot pick a winner.

First, the ingredients. According to Wikipedia, Deadwood ran on HBO from 2004 to 2006. It's set in the gold-rush muck of Deadwood, South Dakota and is widely regarded as one of the greatest television shows of all time, with a shelf of Emmys and a Golden Globe to back that up. Justified arrived in 2010 on FX: a modern-day vigilante U.S. Marshal working rural Kentucky. Longmire followed in 2012 with a present-day Wyoming sheriff, and Justified collected a Peabody Award in 2011, per Wikipedia's history of TV Westerns. Then there's Yellowstone, the Dutton family's Montana cattle empire. Its audience grew into the millions with every season, but critics gave its first season mixed reviews. So the critics' plate and the crowd's plate don't match, and this whole fight is about which one you eat from.

Now the scorecards. On the opinion markets at Morfi, where people put real money on their palate, Deadwood sits at 25% consensus with 8 holders. Justified matches it at 25% with 6 holders. That's a tie, a dead even split down the middle of the chuckwagon. Also on the ballot: 2 other sides. So far 12 traders have put $21,183 behind their opinions, and the market opened less than a day ago. The prestige critics' darling and the Peabody-winning Kentucky smoke-out are tied, while the show with the biggest audience is still getting its boots on.

My verdict, and it's opinion, so spit it into the spittoon if you must. Deadwood is a slow-braised frontier stew: every line of dialogue seasoned like a cuss-word consommé, every bite heavy enough to break a spoon. Justified is brisket off the smoker, quick, swaggering, charred at the edges and impossible to stop eating. Both deserve the belt buckle. Yellowstone? A giant ranch-house buffet that feeds the whole county. Nobody goes hungry, but no gourmand writes poems about the gravy. If this panel crowns the buffet over the braise, I'm hanging up my apron and riding into the sunset.

What to watch next: whether the Yellowstone posse shows up and turns its ratings stampede into conviction, whether the Longmire loyalists ride in from Wyoming, and which of the tied heavyweights blinks first. The kitchen just opened, so this is the best time to plant your fork. Head to Morfi, join the market, and back your favourite frontier dish before the dinner bell rings.