Dennis Haysbert

Return to Lonesome Dove, written by John Wilder, is a TV miniseries involving characters created in Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning western novel Lonesome Dove. The story focuses on a retired Texas Ranger and his adventures driving mustangs from Texas to Montana. It is a sequel to the 1989 miniseries Lonesome Dove, but was not written by McMurtry, who instead wrote and published his own sequel novel Streets of Laredo in the same time frame.

It was nominated for an Emmy Award, and followed by two TV series, Lonesome Dove: The Series and Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years. Neither series lasted long.

McMurtry followed Streets of Laredo with two prequels, which with Laredo were also subsequently made into TV miniseries. Many fans of the Lonesome Dove series of novels do not consider Return to Lonesome Dove or the two derivative TV series to be canonical because of their divergence from McMurtry’s storyline, and the apparent motivation of its production by the success of the original miniseries.