In a vacuum, the logline for Netflix’s latest series “The Abandons” is gangbusters: An old-school oater set in the 1850s, created by Kurt “Sons of Anarchy” Sutter, starring Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey as two mama bears pitting their respective clans against each other in a classic Hatfields vs. McCoy scenario. Sutter, after all, loves an outlaw almost as much as he loves the innate melodrama of found families clashing against the values of modernity out in the wilderness. “Anarchy” was a Western epic with motorcycles, after all, so why not try his hand at horseback?
To its credit, “The Abandons” sometimes clops along with the same kind of over-the-top hokum that made “Sons of Anarchy” such a deliciously trashy watch. But that kind of pablum can’t sustain itself even over seven short-ish episodes (chopped to pieces in a structure that belies Sutter’s own firing by Netflix mere weeks before the end of production), leaving its game cast adrift in a dizzying, dull “Deadwood” imitator with half its nuance and dirtball charm.
The setting is Angel’s Ridge, Oregon, a one-horse town kept afloat by the mining operations of the aristocratic Van Ness family; its matriarch, Constance (a withering, one-note Anderson) sees profits dwindling, and feels an obligation to the town and her family—which includes loyal son Garret (Lucas Till) and daughter Trisha (Aisling Franciosi)—to expand. The best path for that is Jasper Hollow, whose silver deposits could save the business. Problem is, it’s currently settled by feisty, barren Irish homesteader Fiona Nolan (Headey), and the four adopted orphans who serve as her family: Elias Teller (Nick Robinson), his sister Dahlia (Diana Silvers), Albert Mason (Lamar Johnson), and Lilla Belle (Natalia del Riego). Guided by her religious faith and a hard-headedness that’s helped her survive this long on the frontier, Nolan doesn’t want to give up her home so easily, kicking off a cold war between both clans that gets messy quite quickly.
This push and pull between the two clans guides much of the tapestry of “The Abandons”‘ seven-episode runtime, which feels a bit like “1923” with half the budget and a quarter of the intrigue. What rankles most about the show is that, for a series with this robust a premise and two intense titans at their center, its tone is remarkably self-serious. Everyone operates at a kind of solemn register that might work for the high operatic drama the scripts call for, but don’t lean into the innate silliness of the stakes as much as one might like. Dialogue scenes play out with leaden slowness, the action is awkwardly staged (apart from one or two solid moments, and a rollicking assault on a homestead with a flaming cart late in the season), and the shifting runtimes of each episode, from an hour to 35 minutes, make the season’s overall pace run at a stumble instead of a trot.
The cast doesn’t do much to elevate the material; the kids themselves fail to elevate the stock subplots about star-crossed lovers and colonial conflict and interfamily tension, especially Till and Robinson as the favored sons of each family (it doesn’t help, of course, that each of them has faces that look like they’ve seen an iPhone). The supporting cast is vast for a show this short, and everyone’s tough-guy growl blends into each other, so you hardly care where one Michiel Huisman ends, and one Ryan Hurst begins.
As for Headey and Anderson, they’re clearly the marquee names here, and they do their level best to elevate the two-dimensional characters they’ve been given. Anderson spends much of her runtime purring threats through pursed lips, Joan Collins-style, which is a treat; Headey, for her part, glowers under a raggedy hat and gives Fiona the same hell-for-leather rage that made her so menacing in “Game of Thrones” and, frankly, “Dredd.” The best scenes in the show are when Sutter actually puts these two together to trade barbs, distilling the myriad negotiations to a bitter turf war between two mama bears desperate to provide for their families.
“The Abandons” mostly feels like a grab-bag of Western tropes, touching surface-level on the unsteady peace between white settlers and Native American tribes (Michael Greyeyes acquits himself well enough as the most prominent representative of this tension) and the struggles of recently-freed Black slaves to carve out a niche for themselves in the new America. But these feel like window dressing for the soap-opera antics of Headey and Anderson’s bratty, brawling families, which aren’t nearly as interesting.
With Sutter gone, and this show clearly chopped up for a quick release, who knows whether “The Abandons” will get a second season. (Lord knows the rushed season finale sets up a cliffhanger that questions which, if either, of our leads might even still be with us.) But it’s just a right shame that the nuggets of melodrama, and some sumptuous Western production design, can’t make up for the feeling that, save the novelty of its female-led focus, we’ve seen so much of this kind of show before. Its scope is vast, but its depth is shallow.
Sutter once said in an interview that he abandoned the idea for this show, which he developed before “Sons,” because “Deadwood” beat him to the punch. “There’s that great lore of Ian Anderson wanting to be a great rock guitarist, and he saw Clapton play, and he said, ‘F*ck, I’m going to become the best rock flautist that ever lived.’ And he did just that for Jethro Tull.” Given how this has turned out, it’s hard not to wonder if he was right.
Full season screened for review. Currently streaming on Netflix.
