The Son

The Son is mostly about a son with two fathers, one white, the other Comanche. He absorbs the soul, spirit and perspective of the latter. It’s a particularly interesting idea and character based on a celebrated book. Here’s hoping the miniseries lives up to the promise. Saturday’s opener suggests that it should.

[Pierce Brosnan's] awkward drawl is one of the most jarring mood-killers in The Son, and those twinkly eyes are often more playful than dangerous. Even though the journey may be a bit bumpy, The Son still offers an easy ride into the Old West.

It’s not a program that can be easily enjoyed through casual viewing and appreciation for the genre, but rather, it begs itself to be taken seriously, much in the same way its own book sparked stressful conversations through its tale of a family dynasty in the making. For that reason, The Son might not be for everyone.

The Son will rise--if it can live up to its ambitions, if it can more convincingly explain how young Eli on the frontier became old Eli at the dawn of civilization, and if it can be even half as wild as the West it wants to explore.

Without a great authoritative figure to lift the entire piece to a mythic level, The Son may have been better off in book form--where readers can imagine the Texas described in its pages.

The Son is a handsomely shot, well-acted, and respectable piece of work. But it also isn’t surprising or deeply insightful enough about its characters to truly stand out in the current over-capacity venue that is television in 2017.

Sometimes, I wished The Son breathed more and didn’t have so many scenes that play out something like “Here’s my story and what I plan to do,” but one has to admire the ambition of the piece, and at least two stand-out performances.

The Son rises and sets on Brosnan’s work. Everything else is distraction.

For now, the series functions much the same as the oil the McCullochs desperately seek in the early 1900s storyline: It’s obvious something is there, but nobody has figured out how to get to it.

The main problem is that very little of what happens during the 20th-century sequences proves especially interesting, beginning with the rather nondescript assortment of family members, neighbors and friends that surround Eli. If this is supposed to be a big "Dallas"-style epic filled with family intrigue and hoisted petticoats, it's as if they conjured a slightly wizened J.R. but nobody else of much note.

The characters get lost in a tale that meanders between violent episodes (beatings, scalpings, and the occasional ear removal among them), interrupted by dialogue that may have read well in the book, but clunks and sputters when spoken aloud.

The Son is handsomely if stiffly mounted would-be prestige drama without the imagination to rise to the level of its ambitions.

The Son isn’t going to revive the good ol’ days when Westerns dominated television, but it’s watchable and often well written and acted.

Like AMC’s “Hell on Wheels,” the show inspires all kinds of middling adjectives--decent, average, fair, and all right. It’s not bad, but it’s not quite good, either.

While The Son sports sprawling ambitions, the series awkwardly trods over familiar territories.

At its best, The Son--both book and TV show--explores ideas such as what it means to be a success in America and how much ruthlessness is required to achieve that definition; how the legacies of fathers place the burden of history on the shoulders of sons who’d like to shrug them off. It’s too bad the TV version is simplified so drastically, the production too often turns into an ordinary shoot-’em-up.

It's on the fringes that The Son is sometimes smart, nuanced and relevant.

The opening episodes feature a lot of violence and not many characters you really want to latch onto.

AMC’s version of The Son (it debuts Saturday night at 9; I’ve seen the first two episodes) is a glum, lifelessly condensed take on the material that in the early going doesn’t even rise to the passable standard of Hell on Wheels.