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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
3
Mixed:
15
Negative:
5
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Critic Reviews
The GuardianDec 4, 2025
Season 1 Review:
Many of The Abandons’ concerns were better and more interestingly examined in 2022’s The English (a revisionist western further revised by Hugo Blick and starring Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer as two rootless beings finding out what freedom means). But it remains a thoughtful, essentially sound production – and the script improves in quality if not depth.
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Dec 4, 2025
Season 1 Review:
In spite of its strengths, The Abandons has got a weird, urgent quickness to it, a sense that it’s not really committing to telling this story, or is worried that if it strays too far from the central action, viewers will stop paying attention. .... There’s so much that’s left unsaid; with just seven episodes, there clearly wasn’t room for everything, but I really could have used some flashbacks.
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Dec 4, 2025
Season 1 Review:
Headey and Anderson indulge in the pitfalls that have bedeviled men in the western genre for a century is intriguing, and that excitement is sorely missed when the series overcomplicates things. By the end of seven episodes, it has diminished the blunt force of their blows when they finally get to literally and figuratively throw hands.
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Dec 4, 2025
Season 1 Review:
It’s not a bad premise—or a fresh one, save for the diversity of the good guys. .... Their [Lena Headey and Gillian Anderson's] performances are so large and earnest and melodramatic—Mam in a broad Irish brogue, Constance with a pinched malevolence—that two actresses of their stature, never mind talent, would certainly have caught a whiff of the ham in the air. That said, the rest of the cast is solid. .... But it certainly moves along, powered by Mr. Sutter’s sense of narrative abundance.
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Dec 4, 2025
Season 1 Review:
With episodes that often run closer to 30 minutes than 60, an under-developed premise and a finale that ends the season so abruptly I had to double check there weren’t more chapters on the way, “The Abandons” is a frustrating, incomplete take on a compelling premise.
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Dec 4, 2025
Season 1 Review:
In spite of supercharged performances by the two leads, there’s something pasteboard about the characters, drawn in thick outlines but not really colored in; that the actors are saddled with old-timey dialogue makes them less rather than more real. (As is often the case, minor players make a more lifelike impression).
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ColliderDec 3, 2025
Season 1 Review:
There may have been a glimmer of promise in the premise when The Abandons was first announced, especially for a genre that has rarely been led onscreen by women, but the plodding end product that was cobbled together after Sutter's departure can't successfully be carried on Anderson and Headey's strengths alone.
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