Graham Greene used to have a simple taxonomy for his books. Jolly thrillers, like The Third Man, were labelled “an entertainment”, while serious offerings, like The End of the Affair, were called “a novel”. In the same way, some TV shows have aspired to be “good”, while others seem content to be considered “bad”. Yet in recent years, we’ve seen ones that subvert these expectations: good “bad” shows, like The White Lotus, which lace a schlocky premise with surprising originality, and bad “good” shows, like Zero Day, which take prestige conventions and run them through with daftness and ineptitude. And it is in this latter category that Netflix’s new drama, The Abandons, rides into town.
A wealthy woman of European ancestry, Constance Van Ness (Gillian Anderson) arrives in the commune of Angel’s Ridge in the Washington Territory. It’s 1854, and the Van Ness family are pursuing reserves of silver buried deep beneath the local soil. That ambition brings Constance and her family – including bad seed Willem (Toby Hemingway) and gentle pianist Trisha (Aisling Franciosi) – into conflict with Fiona “Mam” Nolan (Lena Headey), the fierce custodian of the coveted acreage. She surrounds herself with adopted children, defending them from hardship, but when one of her girls, Dahlia (Diana Silvers), is assaulted by a newcomer, the rift between the two mothers grows deeper. “The motherly instinct to protect,” muses Constance. “It’s such a powerful thing.”
While the matriarchs are locked in an increasingly bloody rivalry, their families are becoming entwined, not least through young lovers Trisha and Elias (Nick Robinson), Dahlia’s twin. A touch of the Hatfield and McCoys, then, and a hint of Romeo and Juliet. But this is America’s brutal frontier – where the Apache fight for survival, and Mexican raiding gangs tramp north of the border – and truces mean little. “You forget when you’re being beaten,” Mam warns her clan. “How delicate the hand is that holds you down.” The power struggle between these families becomes more of a grapple, with neither side able to pin down the other. One is motivated by greed and grief, the other by righteous fury.
The Abandons is the latest project in the oeuvre of Kurt Sutter, the televisual heavyweight behind Sons of Anarchy. Or so it was, until Sutter exited the production only a few weeks before it wrapped, after rumoured concerns from Netflix about the shape of the show. The series has ended up with just seven episodes (down from the original commission of 10), all of which run significantly shorter than an hour. The show bears traces of this compromise between corporation and creator in its brisk tone, where almost every scene directly serves the furthering of the plot. There is little time to linger over the landscapes, the nature of 19th-century piety, or the cost of life in this vicious society. Instead, the narrative moves linearly forward at an exhausting pace. Of all the Westerns that might’ve inspired the show, it perhaps most resembles Red Dead Redemption, a video game set at the end of this era, which has the same propulsive yet episodic quality.
Sharing top billing, Anderson and Headey appear to enjoy themselves playing (slightly) against type. Constance is an amoral oligarch, while Mam is a strong-willed but goodhearted Irish immigrant (worlds away from Dana Scully and Cersei Lannister, respectively). The idea of subverting the western genre with female leads has been done before (Jane Got a Gun, Meek’s Cutoff, even True Grit) and arguably is well suited to television, where there is more room to luxuriate in the emotional and societal complexity. Yet The Abandons rapidly gets sucked into soap opera territory, where the dialogue is stilted and cliched (“God gave us this home,” growls Mam, “and only God can take it away”) and the characters are differentiated largely by circumstance, rather than personality. The supporting cast are terminally bland, yet neither Anderson nor Headey is afforded more than very blunt interiority.
The western has, in recent years, become a desirable canvas for melodrama. It has turned Taylor Sheridan – creator of Yellowstone, 1883 and 1923 – into the most in-demand showrunner in Hollywood. The Abandons is unlikely to have the same impact for Netflix. When you are mounting a lavish period drama, casting it with a sparkling array of Anglo-American talent, and giving it a plum spot on the world’s biggest streaming service, there’s no excuse for it not to also be good. But, like so many contemporary titles, The Abandons deploys its considerable advantages in service of something safely regurgitative, where characters’ emotions run only as deep as the dried-up banks of the Columbia River.
‘The Abandons’ is on Netflix
