As any fan of mythology-driven TV post Lost can tell you, starting a new show is an act of faith.
With the right creative team or a strong idea, it can be like walking into a well-insured bank with a bag full of money. The returns may not be massive, but you will likely get back what you put into it.
Outer Reach
The end result Not thoroughly satisfactory.
air date: Friday April 15 (Amazon)
Pour: Josh Brolin, Imogen Poots, Lili Taylor, Tamara Podemski, Lewis Pullman, Tom Pelphrey, Noah Reid, Shaun Sipos, Isabel Arraiza, Olive Abercrombie
Creator: Brian Watkins
More often though, it’s like making a bunch of money and shoveling it down a mysterious hole in my backyard. Maybe it’s a duplicating wormhole, or home to a clan of goblins handing out treasure, but more likely it’s a black void and the money’s gone, baby, gone.
More superficially odd than deeply mysterious, Amazon’s Outer Range isn’t always satisfying as a drama series, though this tale of a Wyoming family who dumps things down a mysterious hole on their ranch is at least unintentionally as an extended metaphor for 2022 television savvy. It’s not a total black void of conversation, nor is that eight-part leap of faith fulfilled right away.
Josh Brolin plays Royal Abbott, a recalcitrant, monosyllabic rancher prone to long, monosyllabic dinners with his disabled family. Royal is spiritually skeptical, but his wife Cecilia (Lili Taylor) is a true believer and drags the family to church every week, which can help them weather wave after wave of adversity.
Son Perry (Tom Pelphrey) struggles to raise precocious daughter Amy (Olive Abercrombie) after his wife mysteriously disappeared nine months earlier. The other son, Rhett (Lewis Pullman), is a hard-drinking rodeo cowboy whose dreams of becoming a professional bull rider may be about to end.
To make matters worse, Wayne Tillerson (Will Patton), owner of the neighboring ranch, sends his grumpy, ATV-riding sons (Matt Laurias Trever, Noah Reids Billy and Shaun Sipos’ Luke) over to let Royal know that he is legally entitled to 600 acres of land from Abbott. Oh, and then there’s the arrival of weird backpacking hippie Autumn (Imogen Poots), who asks to camp on Royal’s property for a few days and then starts asking intrusive questions.
Royal is not pleased. Then he finds a huge, perfectly symmetrical, seemingly bottomless hole on his property.
Hilarious Hole-Jinks – Hole-arious Hijinks? – follow.
Creator Brian Watkins begins Outer Range with Royal’s take on Cronus, the titan believed by the ancient Greeks to be responsible for agriculture and who used his signature sickle to cut a hole in the cosmos “to separate the known from the unknown.” “. Like Watkins—hardly the first writer to be torn like a sickle between mystery and aggressive hand-jerking—we are repeatedly reminded that Cronus ruled time, hence the word ‘chronology’. It’s also why the countless people who will inevitably call Outer Range “Yellowstone meets Lost” only reveal that they haven’t seen Netflix’s Dark.
The Yellowstone part is definitely on point. If you like grunting expressions of tortured masculinity, laments about missing cattle heads, and evocative images of the vast prairie, Outer Range should at least generally satisfy. But when it comes to gaping natural openings that can be transdimensional or transtemporal, the head-scratching events unfolding here are a lot closer to Dark For Dummies than anything Lost-related. And Outer Range boasts the most — or at least gaping — screen holes in any piece of mainstream entertainment since the Shia LaBeouf film, in which he spent the entire movement digging holes, whatever it was called.
Technically, the preferred nomenclature for Royal’s newfound hole, if the title of the Alonso Ruizpalacios-led pilot is to be trusted, is ‘the Void’. But most viewers will ask larger hole-related questions like, “Is the hole related to the people who disappear or are disappearing?” or “Is the hole related to the giant buffalo with multiple arrows in its side who keeps popping up in places?” or “Where does the hole go?” or “When does the hole go?” or “Why does this show believe Rhett’s career as a bull rider is important to me?”
Perhaps the most annoying thing about Outer Range, and there are a lot of annoying things about it, is that almost nobody on screen is asking any of the questions that the audience will be asking. And in its general lack of pinpoint curiosity, the narrative advances at a bizarrely icy pace. Unlike Dark, which caused confusion through carefully constructed folding, Outer Range is simply evasive.
Given the magnitude of some of the mysteries, I wish Outer Range wasn’t as wary of beliefs as it is. It’s not that I’m drawn to shows with an overtly Christian leaning, but I thought back to the early episodes of Manifest, another show that gave the impression I wanted to lean toward a loosely religious message without the Have the courage to just do it. Do it.
The show’s most attractive character quickly becomes Tamara Podemski’s interim local sheriff, both gay and Indigenous, not that the show wants to specifically address those elements. It’s at least trying to get answers, albeit not hole-near answers. For a long time hardly anyone knew about the hole, even though it’s a really big hole and people are flying around in helicopters who, at least in theory, would fly over a very big and very symmetrical hole.
The geography isn’t the show’s forte, nor is the night photography; As striking as some of his daytime imagery is, there are sections in the first few episodes where, despite watching my screenings on a big screen TV under cover of darkness, I had no idea what was happening, compelling Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans eclectically weird score to get a lot of work done.
Anyway, back to the strange behavior of the characters. At times it’s intentional and allowed me to anticipate the biggest twists of the finale at least four episodes before I probably should. But then there are sometimes scenes where Patton, who easily puts on the most consistent bizarre performance in a show of bizarre performances, and Brolin, as rugged as the mountains in the background that fill many a frame, blink at each other and menacingly drink clamato – one Choice that is I’ve spent several days trying to understand in context.
I also can’t quite understand why Reid’s character spends large parts of the series singing, small parts of it in his underwear – apart from the fact that the Schitt’s Creek veteran has a decent voice and, I think, to illustrate that he’s a crazier contrast to his rugged siblings, who are characterized by impatience and cheekbones.
Alongside the universally likable Podemski and Brolin – whose gravitas give the series an air of legitimacy it honestly doesn’t deserve – the show’s best performances come from Ozark breakout Pelphrey, who has quickly become TV’s prodigal son, and Poots , whose vulnerable eyes make it easy to empathize with her as you try to figure out what Autumn is up to.
After eight episodes — thankfully only one lasts longer than an hour — Outer Range almost reaches a respectable transition point, where there are enough answers to placate abyssal viewers without providing so many answers that people will be satisfied if Amazon it doesn’t want a second season. I’m not sure how much more of my time I want to scoop into this void when television offers so many captivating black holes.