Netflix isn't waiting to see how East of Eden lands before betting on its makers again.

The streamer confirmed Tuesday that it has given a straight-to-series order for a new take on Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer-winning 1985 novel about two ageing Texas Rangers on one last cattle drive. Running the show are Zoe Kazan and Jeb Stuart, the same pair who just wrapped Netflix's Steinbeck limited series East of Eden, which hasn't even premiered yet.

That's the real story here. A streamer looked at a finished-but-unreleased project and decided the people behind it deserved a second, much bigger swing.

Lonesome Dove already has a towering shadow to work under. The 1989 CBS miniseries starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones pulled in 26 million viewers, won an Emmy and a Golden Globe, and spun off four more McMurtry adaptations over the years, from Return to Lonesome Dove to Comanche Moon. Teton Ridge Entertainment bought the rights to the full four-book saga last year and said then that development would start with the original novel before moving through Streets of Laredo, Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon.

The new logline sticks close to the source. Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call, both former Rangers, head out from the Rio Grande toward Montana chasing a dream the show suggests they may have already missed. Per the official description, it's a story about "unrequited longing, unbreakable friendship, brutal frontier justice."

Jinny Howe, Netflix's head of scripted series for the U.S. And Canada, made the studio's confidence in Kazan and Stuart plain. "After East of Eden, we know exactly what they're capable of," she said, "the depth of character, the sweep of place, the emotional precision."

Kazan and Stuart, in a joint statement, said they're approaching McMurtry's world "with love and respect" and can't wait to "hit the trail with Gus and Call." Teton Ridge president Jillian Share called the book "the kind of story that only comes along once in a generation." Diana Ossana, McMurtry's longtime writing partner and now an executive producer on the new series, said the material has been part of her creative life for decades and that she wants the adaptation to preserve what she called the "emotional truths" of his work even as it's reimagined for a new audience.

No casting has been announced, and Netflix hasn't put a date on either Lonesome Dove or East of Eden. But with three more McMurtry novels already earmarked for adaptation and a studio this eager to keep the band together, this looks less like a one-off order and more like the start of a franchise Netflix is willing to build slowly.

First up, though, audiences still need to actually see East of Eden. That's the show this entire bet is riding on.