Netflix’s new Western series arrives with one eye on the Yellowstone audience and a genuinely enticing premise. Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey star as rivals fighting for primacy in Angel’s Ridge, a fictional frontier town where a grizzly bear might just saunter onto Main Street and cause chaos.
Anderson’s Constance Van Ness, all crisp diction and perfect posture, is the Machiavellian head of a wealthy mining family who dominate the town with not-so-soft power. Headey’s Fiona Nolan is a scrappy interloper who’s installed her chosen family of orphans and outcasts at Jasper Hollow, a cattle ranch built on lucrative seams of silver.
Constance wants Fiona’s land and is willing to fight dirty to get it. Despite her seemingly genteel manners, she isn’t above reminding Fiona, who was unable to have children of her own, that she is a “barren woman”. The Abandons peaks whenever these fearsome schemers share the screen, but to begin with, this doesn’t happen nearly often enough.
In all honesty, the opening episode is a bit of a slog. The show’s creator Kurt Sutter, who previously masterminded the hit biking drama Sons Of Anarchy, exited The Abandons shortly before filming wrapped, reportedly due to creative differences with Netflix. Sources told Deadline that Sutter’s initial cut of the pilot was so long and unwieldy that the streamer intervened and had it carved into episodes with a new cliffhanger.
Even with this alleged intervention, The Abandons still takes a while to gain pace. The sprawling ensemble cast is so overstuffed that key characters like Constance’s ambitious son Garret (Lucas Till) are frequently sidelined. One of Fiona’s surrogate sons, calm and capable Albert (Lamar Johnson), barely figures until the fourth episode, when it’s revealed that he’s more erudite than racist townsfolk expect a young Black man to be.
However, once the battle between the Van Ness clan and Nolan’s close-knit family of ‘abandons’ is fully established, it becomes pretty gripping. Constance seems the more cruel and unscrupulous of the mighty mothers, but Fiona, despite her fierce Catholic faith, may be even more duplicitous.
There’s still a lingering corniness that keeps it from feeling top-tier. The Abandons is the sort of show where an Irish priest arrives in town bearing a secret, barroom brawls are commonplace and Constance’s neglected daughter Trisha (Aisling Franciosi) forms a bond with Fiona’s adoptive son Elias (Nick Robinson) – it’s a Western West Side Story! When Headey’s Game Of Thrones co-star Michiel Huisman keeps popping up as Constance’s shadowy fixer Roache, you’re already primed for his slow and steady backstory.
And despite some nauseatingly gory moments, The Abandons could use a little more grit. Some of these hardy mining folk don’t have enough dirt under their fingernails and the lavish sets look, well, like lavish sets. Fortunately, there’s enough dramatic meat in this period potboiler to keep it simmering along. Come for the family feud – and stay for it, too.
‘The Abandons’ is streaming on Netflix now