Photo courtesy of Netflix
The television Western has been having a moment these past few years, in a way it hasn’t done since the Seventies (with the odd, Deadwood-shaped exception). In the intervening years, TV was drawn to a new frontier: outer space. Now it has returned to Earth with a shotgun bang: American Primeval, The English, Lawmen, various Yellowstone prequels, Billy the Kid – I could continue. The cinematic potential of the mid-19th-century American West is obvious: great plains and vistas, warring clans, settlements not yet immured from the wild, general lawlessness. But there comes a point where you have to ask: what exactly is this new iteration adding?
The Abandons’ unique selling point, I suppose, is that it is a two-hander: its warring clans are led by two strong, widowed matriarchs. The year – as the customary scene-setting text declares – is 1854, the setting Angel Ridge, Washington Territory, a suitably rustic town tucked at the feet of a craggy rock wall. That being all the context required, we move straight into plot. The first of our two female leads, Constance Van Ness (Gillian Anderson), and her two dastardly sons are paying a visit to the town mayor to express their concern that, among continuing losses at the Van Ness mining company, it is imperative that they be allowed to tap the silver vein that runs beneath the nearby Jasper Hollow. If they can’t, she warns, the town will “slide back into the mud” whence it came. The problem is that the four stubborn landowners who live at the Hollow are continuing to refuse access, despite having been offered generous compensation. Constance doesn’t make much of the mayor’s proposed solution: patience. You get the impression that while he technically holds the power, she is the one who wields it.
The unenviable task of playing opposite the inestimable Anderson falls to Lena Headey, best known for another morally dubious matriarch, Cersei in Game of Thrones. Headey’s Fiona “Mam” Nolan lives on a cattle ranch in the Hollow with her four adult quasi-children (Mam is unable to have biological children of her own – a fact Constance likes to stick the knife in about), brother-sister duo Elias and Dahlia, Albert, who is African-American, and Lilla, who is Sioux. Mam is the mother-leader of this ragtag group, a western Robin Hood and His Merry Men, only without the socialism.
Constance is inscrutable, her teeth and wing collars anachronistically white; her signifier-prop is a silver hand-held mirror, engraved with her initials. Looking down on the townspeople from atop her horse, she looks almost hawk-like; she glides above them all, ever watchful, waiting to strike. She is upstaged only by her tremendously good collection of hats. Mam is more transparent; her barely veiled fury works its way across her face. She is apparently devout, often pictured clutching a rosary, but her behaviour seems rather godless. The characters of their various children are less well defined, aside from the predictable contrast in wealth between miners and ranchers: Constance and her brood are sharply turned out; Mam’s gang are more drably dressed.
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Thus, the battle lines are drawn within the first ten minutes – you can probably already imagine the tussle that unfolds. Constance is prepared to do pretty much anything to get her hands on that damn silver; Mam is too, to protect her homestead and her unconventional family. All this takes place against a backdrop of cavalrymen vs indigenous populations. There’s a forbidden romance budding between two of the children. There are high jinks and fisticuffs. There’s even a grizzly sauntering around. Despite brief moments of violence and gore, I found the whole thing curiously sanitised.
The problem with The Abandons is that, three episodes in, I feel like I’ve already seen the whole show. It lacks the gothic sensibility and the creeping menace that marks the best of the genre. Perhaps it would have been stronger had the Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter, who conceived the show, not exited before the end of production due to creative differences. Perhaps it will yet pick up. But “girlboss Western” alone is not a strong enough concept to carry it.
The Abandons
Netflix
[Further reading: Books of the year 2025]
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