Amazon’s ‘Outer Range’: TV Review
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As any fan of mythology-driven television post-Lost can tell you, embarking on a new show is an act of faith.
With the right creative team or potent idea, it can be like walking into a well-insured bank with a bag of money. Maybe the returns won’t be massive, but you’ll probably get back what you put in.
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More often, though, it’s like making a pile of your money and scooping it into a mysterious hole in my backyard. Like maybe it’s a duplicating wormhole or home to a clan of treasure-distributing leprechauns, but more likely it’s a black void and that cash is gone baby gone.
More superficially weird than deeply mysterious, Amazon’s Outer Range isn’t consistently satisfying as a drama series, though as an extended metaphor for television viewing circa 2022, this story of a Wyoming family throwing things in a mysterious hole on their ranch is at least unintentionally savvy. It’s not a totally black void of entertainment, nor, however, is this eight-episode leap of faith immediately fulfilled.
Josh Brolin plays Royal Abbott, an ornery, monosyllabic cattleman prone to long, monosyllabic dinners with his limitedly functional family. Royal is spiritually skeptical, but his wife Cecilia (Lili Taylor) is a true believer, dragging the family to church every week, which may help them handle wave after wave of adversity.
Son Perry (Tom Pelphrey) is struggling to raise precocious daughter Amy (Olive Abercrombie) after the unexplained disappearance of his wife nine months earlier. Other son Rhett (Lewis Pullman) is a hard-drinking, hard-living rodeo cowboy whose professional bull-riding dreams may be nearing an end.
To make matters worse, Wayne Tillerson (Will Patton), owner of the neighboring ranch, sends his surly, ATV-riding sons (Matt Lauria’s Trever, Noah Reid’s Billy and Shaun Sipos’ Luke) over to let Royal know that he’s made a legal claim on 600 acres of Abbott land. Oh, and then there’s the arrival of peculiar backpacking hippie Autumn (Imogen Poots), who asks to camp out for a few days on Royal’s property and then starts posing intrusive questions.
Royal is not pleased. Then he finds a vast, perfectly symmetrical, apparently bottomless hole on his property.
Hilarious hole-jinks — hole-arious hijinks? — ensue.
Creator Brian Watkins begins Outer Range with Royal opining about Cronus, the titan who the ancient Greeks believed was responsible for agriculture and who used his trademark sickle to cut a hole in the cosmos, “to separate the known from the unknown.” As Watkins — hardly the first writer to be torn, as if with a sickle, between keeping things enigmatic and aggressively over-tipping his hand — reminds us on several occasions, Cronus had dominion over time, hence the word “chronology.” That’s also why the myriad people who will inevitably call Outer Range “Yellowstone meets Lost” are just exposing that they haven’t watched Netflix’s Dark.
The Yellowstone part is clearly on-point. If you like grunting expressions of tormented masculinity, complaints about missing heads of cattle and evocative imagery of the wide-open prairie, Outer Range should at least generally satisfy. But when it comes to gaping natural orifices that may be trans-dimensional or trans-temporal, the head-scratching events transpiring here are far closer to Dark For Dummies than anything Lost-related. And Outer Range offers the most — or at least most gaping — on-screen holes in a piece of mainstream entertainment since the Shia LaBeouf movie in which he spent the entire moving digging holes, whatever that was called.
Technically, if the title of the Alonso Ruizpalacios-directed pilot is to be trusted, the preferred nomenclature for Royal’s new-found hole is “the void.” But most viewers will be asking bigger hole-related questions like, “Is the hole related to the people who are disappearing or being disappeared?” or “Is the hole related to the giant buffalo with several arrows in its side who keeps popping up places?” or “Where does the hole go?” or “When does the hole go?” or “Why is this show convinced that I care about Rhett’s bull-riding career?”
Perhaps the most infuriating thing about Outer Range, and there are a lot of infuriating things about it, is how almost nobody on-screen is asking any of the questions that audiences will be asking. And, in its general lack of hole-directed inquisitiveness, the narrative progresses at a bizarrely glacial pace. Unlike Dark, which generated puzzlement through carefully constructed convolution, Outer Range is simply evasive.
Given the scale of some of the enigmas, I wish Outer Range weren’t as tentative about issues of faith as it is. It isn’t that I’m attracted to shows with an overt Christian bent, but I found myself thinking back on the early episodes of Manifest, another show that gave the impression of wanting to tend toward some loosely religious messaging without the gumption to just do it.
The show’s most appealing character quickly becomes Tamara Podemski’s local interim sheriff, both gay and Indigenous, not that the show wants to specifically deal with those elements either. She’s at least trying to get answers, albeit not hole-adjacent answers. For the longest time, barely anybody knows about the hole, even though it’s a really big hole and there are people flying around in helicopters that, at least in theory, would fly over what is, yes, a very large and very symmetrical hole.
Geography is not the show’s strongest point, nor is nighttime photography; as striking as some of its daytime imagery is, there are stretches in the first couple of episodes in which, despite watching my screeners on a big television under the cover of darkness, I had no clue what was happening, forcing Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’s eclectically odd score to do a lot of work.
Anyway, back to the strange behavior of the characters. Sometimes it’s intentional and it allowed me to anticipate the finale’s biggest twists at least four episodes before I was probably supposed to. But then sometimes there are scenes where Patton, giving easily the most consistently bizarre performance in a show of bizarre performances, and Brolin, as craggy as the background mountains that fill many a frame, squint at each other and threateningly drink Clamato — a choice that I’ve spent several days attempting to understand in context.
I’m also at a loss to completely understand why Reid’s character spends large chunks of the series singing, small chunks of that in his underwear — other than that the Schitt’s Creek veteran has a decent voice and, I guess, to illustrate that he’s a loopier contrast to his gruffer siblings, who are defined by impatience and cheekbones.
In addition to the generally likable Podemski and Brolin — whose gravitas gives the series an air of legitimacy that, frankly, it doesn’t deserve — the show’s best performances come from Ozark breakout Pelphrey, quickly becoming TV’s go-to prodigal son, and Poots, whose wide-eyed vulnerability makes her easy to empathize with while you’re trying to figure out what Autumn is up to.
After eight episodes — thankfully only one going over an hour — Outer Range comes close to reaching a respectable transitional point where it gives enough answers to placate chasm-inclined viewers, without giving so many answers that people will be content if Amazon doesn’t want a second season. Me, I’m not sure how much more of my time I feel like shoveling into this void when TV offers so many more compelling black holes.
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