{"id":330024,"date":"2025-12-04T13:19:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T13:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/330024\/"},"modified":"2025-12-04T13:19:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T13:19:09","slug":"gillian-anderson-in-kurt-sutter-netflix-western","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/330024\/","title":{"rendered":"Gillian Anderson in Kurt Sutter Netflix Western"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tFor better and worse, Kurt Sutter<\/a> is a television creator whom I associate with excess.<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom his work writing on The Shield<\/a>, through Sons of Anarchy and The Bastard Executioner, Sutter dramas have reliably, if not always pleasurably, delivered high dramatic stakes, wild emotional extremes and \u2014 once FX removed all pre-existing guardrails and said \u201cSure, do whatever you want, Kurt\u201d \u2014 thoroughly unrestrained running times.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe Abandons\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\t‘Abandons’ its potential.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAirdate: Thursday, December 4 (Netflix)
Cast: Lena Headey, Gillian Anderson, Nick Robinson, Diana Silvers, Lamar Johnson, Natalia del Riego, Lucas Till, Aisling Franciosi
Creator: Kurt Sutter\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tFor better and worse, Kurt Sutter is not a television creator whom I associate with insufficiencies. I\u2019ve never watched a Kurt Sutter show and thought, \u201cMan, the language is insufficiently expressive, the violence insufficiently shocking, the characters insufficiently tormented, the themes insufficiently articulated, the episodes insufficiently long.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFirst time for everything, though.<\/p>\n

\n\tEven if I didn\u2019t know that Netflix<\/a> initially ordered 10 episodes while the series premiering this week is only seven (four of them under 40 minutes), and even if I didn\u2019t know that Sutter parted ways<\/a> with the show before the conclusion of shooting over a year ago, I would know something went wrong somewhere.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Abandons<\/a> is never particularly bad, but it\u2019s confusingly spare, rushed and vaguely shoddy, as if the final product was, in some way, gutted of its most potentially distinctive elements. Given the amount of time I spend watching bloated and overextended dramas that nobody had the restraint to trim, \u201cbrisk watchability\u201d isn\u2019t the worst sin. But despite an exceptionally steely central performance from Gillian Anderson<\/a>, The Abandons ranks a vast distance behind the wonderful Godless<\/a> and the committedly brutal American Primeval<\/a> in the mini-genre of revisionist female-driven Westerns streaming on Netflix.<\/p>\n

\n\tSet fuzzily in the Washington Territory in 1854 \u2014 I know these details exclusively from Netflix\u2019s press notes \u2014 The Abandons focuses on a pair of matriarchs controlling the fate of the frontier town of Angel\u2019s Ridge.<\/p>\n

\n\tConstance Van Ness (Anderson) owns the mining interests that keep Angel\u2019s Ridge in business, lording her power over the elected mayor (Patton Oswalt, not a reason to watch) and law enforcement. Constance, whose husband died at some point semi-recently, has three kids: Willem (Toby Hemingway) is a screw-up (and nothing else); Garret (Lucas Till<\/a>) glowers a lot (and nothing else); and Trisha (Aisling Franciosi) plays the piano (and flirts with two different men, but nothing else).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe primary mines around Angel\u2019s Ridge are drying up, but salvation for the community could come in the form of a rich vein of silver that may run through Jasper Hollow \u2014 which is good for Constance, except that she doesn\u2019t own that land and its occupants don\u2019t want to sell (or exploit the mineral resources themselves, for reasons that aren\u2019t even broached).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe most influential resident of the Hollow is Fiona Nolan (Lena Headey<\/a>). Catholic and of Irish extraction, Fiona tried having kids with her late husband, but instead ended up adopting a quartet of orphans \u2014 siblings Elias (Nick Robinson) and Dahlia (Diana Silvers), plus Albert (Lamar Johnson) and Lilla (Natalia del Riego).<\/p>\n

\n\tTry your best not to dwell too much on how old any of Fiona\u2019s Orphans are supposed to be or how long she\u2019s been \u201craising\u201d them, or how Albert, who is Black, and Lilla, who is Native American, came into the familial fold; of all the details in the series that feel gutted, the relationships in this family, which should probably be the heart of the entire darned show, feel most gutted. Elias has a clandestine romance. Dahlia experiences a traumatic incident in the pilot. Albert gets a pair of half-hearted subplots in later episodes and Lilla is just kinda\u2026there, often completely forgotten in the edit, as if the other members of the family just accidentally failed to invite her to pivotal deliberations.<\/p>\n

\n\tFiona runs CGI cattle on a ranch named The Abandons. She doesn\u2019t want to sell (nor do her less developed neighbors including Ryan Hurst\u2019s Miles, a bearded distiller with a secret sadness, and Brian F. O\u2019Byrne\u2019s Walter, a sad man with a beard). Constance doesn\u2019t like that and, after engaging in a series of ill-fated pranks, she enlists Xavier (Michiel Huisman), an outlaw type, to engage in sterner tactics. There\u2019s stuff involving the local Native American tribes and the occasional mention of the region\u2019s actual history, but the less said about either element, the better.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the pilot, you can sense Sutter setting up intriguing contrasts between Catholic, Irish, emotionally volatile Fiona and Protestant, generically European, emotionally withholding Constance, but at some point, those details cease to be relevant as episodes zip along with no room for nuance. Even when Fiona\u2019s priest\/confessor (Sons of Anarchy veteran Timothy V. Murphy) comes through town, all discussion of faith between them has been eliminated and instead he\u2019s there to play cards or something. When Sutter wants to ground a character\u2019s psychology in Catholicism, he is not one to soft-pedal the details, much less erase them from existence. Yet in The Abandons, it\u2019s left for viewers to fill in the blanks \u2014 or, far more likely, simply decide not to care.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe series is peppered with seemingly important subplots that go nowhere, characters who are introduced and contribute nothing or, more frequently, are played by actors who have worked with Sutter in the past. It\u2019s possible Sutter cast people like Hurst, O\u2019Byrne and Katey Sagal, playing the madame of the local brothel, because he knew they would contribute sufficient depth with a minimum of screen time, which would allow him to dedicate more time to fleshing out the younger pieces of the ensemble. But it\u2019s astonishing how little Robinson, Silvers, Johnson, del Riego, Till and Franciosi are given to do.<\/p>\n

\n\tAround the fourth episode, as people are dying and stakes are rising, it\u2019s as if somebody realized that Albert had no dimension at all and suggested \u201cLet\u2019s have him be drafted as a schoolteacher and he\u2019ll teach the kids about the letter \u2018D,\u2019 and let\u2019s give him a chaste love story with a young woman who apparently doesn\u2019t exist when she isn\u2019t chastely flirting with him.\u201d This is, I\u2019ll emphasize, more characterization than del Riego\u2019s Lilla gets; ditto the character who has to be a victim of sexual violence as a plot instigator, which may be the most Sutter-y detail in the entire show.<\/p>\n

\n\tWithout the religious underpinnings that clearly were supposed to be Fiona\u2019s primary trait \u2014 at one point, it\u2019s suggested that she\u2019s made a transition from piety to zealotry when, in truth, there\u2019s evidence of neither \u2014 she has no mooring, and Headey\u2019s performance and accent are fittingly inconsistent. I\u2019m not sure Anderson has a consistent character either, but she breathes a lot of subtle inflection into the underwritten role. When Headey and Anderson have their frequent stare-downs, the fire-and-ice intensity plays well because of the performers and not because of anything resembling internal logic.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe draining of character and subtext and any sort of meaningful connective tissue would make more sense if a conscious effort had been made to steer The Abandons in the direction of spectacle and set pieces and the beauty of the Alberta-filmed locations. But the series directors, led by Otto Bathurst and Gwyneth Horder-Payton, seem hamstrung as well. The CGI cattle stampede in the pilot is laughable and, like most of the show\u2019s nighttime scenes, muddy and murky, while several later scenes featuring prairie violence are badly staged. It\u2019s only in the finale that you get the beats of narratively ruthless violence that, at his best, Sutter does so well. But it turns out that violence involving people you don\u2019t much care about is just affectless violence \u2014 even things I can imagine would have been gut-punches in a fully realized drama.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe\u2019ll never see the version of The Abandons that Sutter and Netflix originally intended to make, and the version we get doesn\u2019t even have the common decency to conclude. While I\u2019ll continue to insist that The Abandons isn\u2019t painful to watch (even when tragedy dictates it ought to be), neither the seven episodes nor the cliffhanger they culminate in are compelling enough to warrant investing further in a show that already feels cut to bits and has lost its driving creative force.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For better and worse, Kurt Sutter is a television creator whom I associate with excess. From his work…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330025,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,3809,167480,97363,167481,217,167482,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-330024","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-gillian-anderson","10":"tag-kurt-sutter","11":"tag-lena-headey","12":"tag-lucas-till","13":"tag-netflix","14":"tag-the-abandons","15":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}