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That Dirty Black Bag

That Dirty Black Bag is an eight-episode television western that premiered on AMC+ on March 10, 2022, a modern reworking of the Italian spaghetti western tradition, produced by the Italian company Palomar and Canada's BRON Studios.1 It grew out of a low-budget web series, Quella sporca sacca nera, that the Sardinian filmmaker Mauro Aragoni shot in 2014, and it stars Dominic Cooper and Douglas Booth as an outlaw sheriff and a bounty hunter whose paths collide over eight days in a drought-stricken frontier town.2 • 1

Key factDetail
FormatEight-part scripted series produced in English, premiered March 10, 2022 on AMC+ in the United States, Canada, and Australia1
CreatorsMauro Aragoni, Silvia Ebreul, Marcello Izzo, and Fabio Paladini; directed by Aragoni and the Irish director Brian O'Malley3
Lead castDominic Cooper as Sheriff Arthur McCoy, Douglas Booth as Red Bill, with Niv Sultan, Guido Caprino, Christian Cooke, Travis Fimmel, and Aidan Gillen1
FilmingItaly (Apulia), Spain (Almería), and Morocco; eight weeks of shooting concluded June 3, 20214 • 5
OriginBased on Quella sporca sacca nera, a 2014 web series Aragoni shot in Sardinia on a very low budget2
Reception80% Tomatometer and 77% Popcornmeter on Rotten Tomatoes; 7.1/10 on IMDb from about 5,300 users6 • 7
RatingTV-MA8

Spoilers

Premise

The story covers an eight-day clash between two men. Arthur McCoy, played by Dominic Cooper, is the sheriff of Greenvale, a town whose gold rush has ended and which has suffered a five-year drought; press materials describe him as an incorruptible lawman with a troubled past, while reviewers found him cheerfully corrupt and sadistic.1 • 9 Red Bill, played by Douglas Booth, is a solitary bounty hunter known for decapitating his victims and carrying their heads in a dirty black bag, because, as he puts it, "Heads weigh less than bodies."1 Red Bill arrives in Greenvale searching for the man who killed his mother, collecting the heads of other wanted men along the way.10

Around this central conflict the season weaves several threads: the farmer Steve (Christian Cooke), who believes God has told him the drought will end and resists the wealthy Thompson (Paterson Joseph), who wants to buy his land and dig for gold; Eve (Niv Sultan), proprietor of the local brothel and one of Greenvale's most quietly influential citizens; and Bronson (Guido Caprino), McCoy's older brother, who in the present day runs for governor.9 • 8 The press release frames the series as a world with "no heroes, nobody is invincible, and predators become the prey," driven by bounty hunters, bandits, and vendettas.1

Origin and production

The series began as Quella sporca sacca nera, a web series Aragoni shot in Sardinia in 2014 at very low cost, about a bounty hunter in 19th-century Mexico tracking two bandits while carrying a mysterious black bag.2 The project won awards at festivals including the Los Angeles Web Fest, and the Italian edition of Rolling Stone named it one of the ten titles of the year in its genre, alongside Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight and Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant.11 Aragoni, born in Tortolì in 1989, has said that these awards opened the way to a large-scale production, and that a short film he made with the rapper Salmo, Nuraghes S'Arena, convinced the producers to trust him with the direction of the television version.12

Production. Palomar, founded in 1986 by Carlo Degli Esposti and part of the Mediawan group, co-produced with BRON Studios; the eight-part series was produced in English with three seasons already planned.1 Filming ran for eight weeks, ending on June 3, 2021, with about ten weeks of work in Apulia, Italy, where sets included the Jesce masseria and the Pisciulo caves at Altamura, locations at Poggiorsini, Spinazzola, Gravina, Santeramo, Fasano, Martina Franca, Lecce, and Melendugno, and interiors built in the pavilions of Bari's Fiera del Levante.4 • 5 The Spanish exteriors were shot in Almería, including the Fort Bravo set where many Leone films were made; Douglas Booth recalled riding between original western town sets during horse training.13 The shoot also faced heat in Morocco and the COVID-19 outbreak.13

Genre positioning

The series is an explicit homage to the spaghetti western, the Italian-made western subgenre of the 1960s associated with Sergio Leone, and it was shot in the same Spanish landscapes that Leone used.1 • 13 Reviewers noted its faithful adherence to the genre's playbook, including a shot of a gunfighter trapping a fly in his revolver barrel lifted from Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, while adding horror, mystery, and steampunk elements and a level of stylized violence that pushes toward the absurd.14 • 11 The Wall Street Journal's John Anderson judged that what made the series entertaining was not its adherence to westerns past but its own tweaks on the genre.6

Reception and availability

Critical response was mixed. Rotten Tomatoes recorded an 80% Tomatometer from five reviews and a 77% audience score; Slant Magazine gave 2.5 out of 4, finding the early storylines slow but the series darkly funny, while Glenn Garvin in Reason called it an anachronistic bore with a garbled story.6 • 9 • 14 The Review Geek scored the season 6/10, praising the cinematography against picturesque Spanish backdrops but criticizing inconsistent storytelling and unresolved threads.15

Only one season was made, despite the three seasons planned at production.1 The series reached a wider audience later through Netflix in the United States, and was removed from Netflix US on August 19, 2025.16 In Italy it arrived on Paramount+ in January 2023, and a 2026 survey of the main catalogs found it no longer legally available on any Italian streaming service.17

References

  1. AMC+ Acquires Worldwide Premiere of That Dirty Black Bag w/ Dominic Cooper, Douglas Booth, AMC Global Media (November 18, 2021)
  2. That Dirty Black Bag – The locations of the movie, Italy for Movies
  3. That Dirty Black Bag, The Spaghetti Western Database
  4. End of shoot – That Dirty Black Bag, Fresco Film (June 4, 2021)
  5. Quella sporca sacca nera: il 10 marzo prima mondiale su AMC+ della serie girata in Puglia, Italy for Movies (February 15, 2022)
  6. That Dirty Black Bag: Season 1, Rotten Tomatoes
  7. That Dirty Black Bag (TV Series 2022), IMDb
  8. Watch That Dirty Black Bag Online, AMC+
  9. That Dirty Black Bag Review: A Spaghetti Western with a Sluggish Narrative Pulse, Slant Magazine (March 10, 2022)
  10. That Dirty Black Bag – Where to Watch and Stream, TV Guide
  11. Dominic Cooper, en Almería para el rodaje del western 'That Dirty Black Bag', La Voz de Almería
  12. La serie western del regista sardo Mauro Aragoni sbarca su Netflix Usa, Sardiniapost
  13. 'That Dirty Black Bag' adds to TV's Western resurgence
  14. That Dirty Black Bag Shows Exactly Why Spaghetti Westerns Died, Reason (March 11, 2022)
  15. That Dirty Black Bag Season 1 Review, The Review Geek (May 2022)
  16. Where to watch 'That Dirty Black Bag (2022)' on Netflix, Flixboss
  17. That Dirty Black Bag deserved a second season, Westerns...All'Italiana! (August 2026)

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Scripted television and comedy series › Genre and subject-scripted series › Western television series

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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That Dirty Black Bag

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