The Abandons

The genre is no longer a boys’ club but what’s even fresher in The Abandons is the theme of motherhood. Constance and Fiona run their families with a strong hand, their protectiveness a hair away from lunacy.

Fiona Nolan and her family are the more interesting of the two, if only because how they came together. .... When Anderson and Headey are in scenes together, it’s hard to look away.

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.

It's easy to imagine a more entertaining version of The Abandons where Headey and Anderson really get to cook, but here they're just battling against unmemorable material.

Anderson and Headey give it their full commitment but their characters are painfully one note.

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.

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.

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.

What sounds like enticing subject matter—a gritty western from “Sons of Anarchy” creator Kurt Sutter—mostly falls apart in the execution, becoming more dead end than “Deadwood.”

A dizzying, dull “Deadwood” imitator with half its nuance and dirtball charm.

A pretender through and through, piling on clichés without any sense of authenticity, rhythm, or originality.

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.

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).

The problems with The Abandons range from the superficial to the profound.

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.

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.

The Abandons deploys its considerable advantages in service of something safely regurgitative, where characters’ emotions run only as deep as the dried-up banks of the Columbia River.

Viewers could have been patient with a show this lethargic if it paid off, but this Western just cuts to black in a way that will likely leave them more furious than excited about a follow-up.

Despite its contentious creation, the true tragedy of “The Abandons” is that even in pieces, it still serves the same function as all those other shows: to make slop so prevalent, viewers won’t be able to separate the bad from the abandoned.

Everyone would probably be in better form if the writing were decent.

Even the most diehard of Western fans should keep on scrolling.