'Outsiders': Mountain Folk Drinkin' Moonshine and Makin' Trouble
A would-be epic saga of an Appalachian mountain clan at war with civilization, Outsiders is a big, lusty, overblown production that combines Sons of Anarchy and Justified with Yosemite Sam cartoons, to achieve a lot of bluster, burying good actors in scraggly hair, greasy faces, and tough talk about moonshine and pesky “revenoors.”
The new series, premiering Tuesday night on WGN, stars the wonderful actor David Morse (Treme, St. Elsewhere) as Big Foster Farrell, the head of a lawless backwoods community — or he would be, if only his frail, elderly mother (the equally excellent Phyllis Somerville) would die. She’s the stern matriarch of this group of outsiders, and Big Foster is fervently hoping she’ll kick the bucket and leave him the king of this sooty hill.
It’s that hill — Shay Mountain — that a big energy company wants to strip-mine, but first it has to dislodge the Farrells and their followers, who have occupied the territory for decades in an inbred community with its own rules, laws, language, and fiddle music. The task of Farrell-removal falls, very improbably, to one local sheriff, Wade Houghton (The Bridge’s Thomas M. Wright, yet another fine actor), who is a good man, a sad man (he’s fighting a booze-and-pills problem), and a scared man. Every time a higher-up tells Sheriff Wade he’s got to clear those Farrell’s off the mountain, he mutters some whiny variation of “I got a little boy…”
Meanwhile, we spend a lot of time with Big Foster and his followers, who combine the old (clothes made from the pelts of animals they killed) and the new (the men-folk zoom down the hill into town on roaring ATVs, hootin’ and hollerin’ and shopliftin’ by driving down the aisles of a supermarket grabbin’ whatever they like).
Over the first five episodes made available for review, the show — created by Peter Mattei with producers including Peter Tolan (Rescue Me) and Paul Giamatti — amounts to a hill of beans. Beans with a lot of gassy verbiage: “This is our land and this is our blood… and we will never leave this mountain!” crows the matriarch, called Lady Ray. At another point, Big Foster bellows, “This mountain don’t come free… our rent, it come in blood!”
Outsiders tries to work up an environmental justification for some of the Farrells’s self-righteous anger, tapping into the idea that the big bad energy company will harm the health of law-abiding citizens in the surrounding towns. Asa (Hannibal’s Joe Anderson) — an outsider among the Outsiders for having lived for a time among normal folk and thus designated a “lostie” in the made-up language of the Outsiders — attends a town meeting and improvises an anti-company rap to the tune of the National Anthem that ends with the lines, “from the land of pure greed and the home of the slave.”
There are a couple of romantic subplots, including Asa romancing Gillian Alexy’s G’Winveer (read that as “Guinevere” — Outsiders is always overreaching to myths such as Arthurian legend), who is pledged to Lil Foster (Ryan Hurst — Sons of Anarchy’s Opie, utilizing the same ratty hairdo). Another mountain man tries to woo an attractive local salesgirl, who gets the best line thus far: Explaining why their attraction won’t get very far, she says, “I’m black and you are weird.”
The moonshine the mountain clan makes is so strong, it drives one teenager to kill his father. You might want to cut the stuff with a little orange juice, but you’ll need a jar of it to keep watching Outsiders.
Outsiders airs Tuesday nights at 10 p.m. on WGN.
