"Entertainment Weekly"s Ken Tucker enjoyed the "nervy attempt to do something different with the TV Western" in the pilot and said that "Brisco County is less a satire of the Western's cliches than a revitalization of them." Writing in the "Toronto Star", Greg Quill said that the pilot introduced "Brisco" as "a western in the loosest use of the term". Quill noted that the pilot includes "every cliche in the western movie arsenal", but that "everything, from characters to plot turns, is skewed away from the norm", and that the pilot episode rose above the level of western spoof to become an "outrageously confident tribute to... the best of the genre".