‘The Abandons’ Review: Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey Lead Kurt Sutter’s Disappointingly Slight Netflix Western
For better and worse, Kurt Sutter is a television creator whom I associate with excess.
From his work writing on The Shield, through Sons of Anarchy and The Bastard Executioner, Sutter dramas have reliably, if not always pleasurably, delivered high dramatic stakes, wild emotional extremes and — once FX removed all pre-existing guardrails and said “Sure, do whatever you want, Kurt” — thoroughly unrestrained running times.
The Abandons
The Bottom Line
‘Abandons’ its potential.
Airdate: 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
For better and worse, Kurt Sutter is not a television creator whom I associate with insufficiencies. I’ve never watched a Kurt Sutter show and thought, “Man, the language is insufficiently expressive, the violence insufficiently shocking, the characters insufficiently tormented, the themes insufficiently articulated, the episodes insufficiently long.”
First time for everything, though.
Even if I didn’t know that Netflix initially ordered 10 episodes while the series premiering this week is only seven (four of them under 40 minutes), and even if I didn’t know that Sutter parted ways with the show before the conclusion of shooting over a year ago, I would know something went wrong somewhere.
The Abandons is never particularly bad, but it’s 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, “brisk watchability” isn’t the worst sin. But despite an exceptionally steely central performance from Gillian Anderson, The Abandons ranks a vast distance behind the wonderful Godless and the committedly brutal American Primeval in the mini-genre of revisionist female-driven Westerns streaming on Netflix.
Set fuzzily in the Washington Territory in 1854 — I know these details exclusively from Netflix’s press notes — The Abandons focuses on a pair of matriarchs controlling the fate of the frontier town of Angel’s Ridge.
Constance Van Ness (Anderson) owns the mining interests that keep Angel’s 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) glowers a lot (and nothing else); and Trisha (Aisling Franciosi) plays the piano (and flirts with two different men, but nothing else).
The primary mines around Angel’s 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 — which is good for Constance, except that she doesn’t own that land and its occupants don’t want to sell (or exploit the mineral resources themselves, for reasons that aren’t even broached).
The most influential resident of the Hollow is Fiona Nolan (Lena Headey). Catholic and of Irish extraction, Fiona tried having kids with her late husband, but instead ended up adopting a quartet of orphans — siblings Elias (Nick Robinson) and Dahlia (Diana Silvers), plus Albert (Lamar Johnson) and Lilla (Natalia del Riego).
Try your best not to dwell too much on how old any of Fiona’s Orphans are supposed to be or how long she’s been “raising” 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…there, often completely forgotten in the edit, as if the other members of the family just accidentally failed to invite her to pivotal deliberations.
Fiona runs CGI cattle on a ranch named The Abandons. She doesn’t want to sell (nor do her less developed neighbors including Ryan Hurst’s Miles, a bearded distiller with a secret sadness, and Brian F. O’Byrne’s Walter, a sad man with a beard). Constance doesn’t 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’s stuff involving the local Native American tribes and the occasional mention of the region’s actual history, but the less said about either element, the better.
In 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’s priest/confessor (Sons of Anarchy veteran Timothy V. Murphy) comes through town, all discussion of faith between them has been eliminated and instead he’s there to play cards or something. When Sutter wants to ground a character’s psychology in Catholicism, he is not one to soft-pedal the details, much less erase them from existence. Yet in The Abandons, it’s left for viewers to fill in the blanks — or, far more likely, simply decide not to care.
The 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’s possible Sutter cast people like Hurst, O’Byrne 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’s astonishing how little Robinson, Silvers, Johnson, del Riego, Till and Franciosi are given to do.
Around the fourth episode, as people are dying and stakes are rising, it’s as if somebody realized that Albert had no dimension at all and suggested “Let’s have him be drafted as a schoolteacher and he’ll teach the kids about the letter ‘D,’ and let’s give him a chaste love story with a young woman who apparently doesn’t exist when she isn’t chastely flirting with him.” This is, I’ll emphasize, more characterization than del Riego’s 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.
Without the religious underpinnings that clearly were supposed to be Fiona’s primary trait — at one point, it’s suggested that she’s made a transition from piety to zealotry when, in truth, there’s evidence of neither — she has no mooring, and Headey’s performance and accent are fittingly inconsistent. I’m 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.
The 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’s nighttime scenes, muddy and murky, while several later scenes featuring prairie violence are badly staged. It’s 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’t much care about is just affectless violence — even things I can imagine would have been gut-punches in a fully realized drama.
We’ll never see the version of The Abandons that Sutter and Netflix originally intended to make, and the version we get doesn’t even have the common decency to conclude. While I’ll continue to insist that The Abandons isn’t 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.
