Untamed

It's a smart and compelling drama, with some great acting and a real sense of place.

“Untamed” sits comfortably within the tradition of prestige cable dramas that prize atmosphere and character over plot mechanics. The show moves at its own pace — slow, sure, and confident — trusting the emotional stakes to do the heavy lifting.

Despite a title that seems calculated to pitch this six-part drama into the mental dustbin of adjectival crime dramas, “Untamed” is a mystery that this viewer binged with uncharacteristic enthusiasm.

Having watched all six episodes, I would never have guessed the outcome or the guilty party. Ultimately, it is a series which transcends, with ease, its central cliché.

If you’re hoping for a sophisticated, unpredictable mystery, it isn’t quite up to par. While Turner’s investigation leads us along a few intriguing twists and turns, the show’s creators seem more interested in exploring Yosemite than telling a story that keeps us guessing. It’s fortunate, then, that the park makes for such a compelling co-lead character, going a long way to balance out the weaker elements of the plot.

If the dialogue often has the flavor of coming off a page rather than out of a character, it gets the job done, and if the characters are essentially static, people don’t change overnight, and consistency is a hallmark of detective fiction. The narrative wisely stays close to Turner and/or Vasquez; there are enough twists and tendrils in the main overlapping plots without running off into less related matters.

While this is a fairly traditional, largely straightforward crime drama, it still manages to touch upon fairly delicate issues of loss, guilt, and trauma in ways that are both surprising and genuinely affecting.

Bana is riveting as the lead, DeWitt gives the series the saga the pathos it begs for, Santiago measures up as more than a “Training Day” trainee and Bethel, Trujillo and Neill shine in support...They lift “Untamed” to the level of “a good beach read,” in miniseries form, a trip to Yosemite focused purely on everything that can go wrong there and the people who have to piece together what happened when it does.

The series’ premise is better suited to a movie, but at six episodes it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

It’s conventional stuff, but Bana and Santiago play off each other reasonably well, and the mystery (which ends up, as so many mysteries do these days, as a cri de coeur about neglected children) is a little more rigorously worked out than the Netflix norm.

The kind of show you might turn on as a distraction instead of a show that requires close watching. But it’s an entertaining distraction, with just enough story to keep things moving.

It’s a show that begins with topical potential that goes unrealized and, instead, settles for spinning a solid yarn, albeit one propped up by entirely too many clichés.

As serviceable as it is, it leaves the impression of having once had the bones of a more elegant thriller, softened to become a more standard, more palatable prospect. It’s twisty, but it doesn’t take much to guess what those twists are, and where they will lead.

There’s plenty of substance to keep curiosity afloat enough as the next episode begins to roll. Unfortunately, said substance can’t help but lose its own connective tissue as an intriguing murder mystery devolves before long into something not at all unlike what came before, ultimately transforming into just another show about people trying to get to the bottom of something unusual.

The premise promises more than what ultimately gets delivered in this disjointed, semi-compelling six-part series.

Untamed is a digestible enough crime series with a couple of solid performances. But it’s not satisfying because it frustratingly stretches itself thin.

As vexing as its distension, however, is its mildness—a quality that plagues its stock characters, its ho-hum mystery, and its climactic revelations, which are visible from a mountain peak away.

Inessential yet world-building exchanges set “Untamed” apart from most streaming-service procedurals. So does the Smiths’ ability to maintain mysteries through several episodes and deliver genuine thrills and surprises. This quality wanes, however, as the rangers uncover criminal enterprises that pose greater threats to the national park than even DOGE did.

It leans harder and harder on murder-mystery tropes that have all but exhausted their utility. By the end, “Untamed” can only offer more of the same, despite ample opportunity to provide something “different.”

As it stands, the Netflix series is tonally ineffective, visually uncompelling, and narratively drags viewers to the middle of nowhere.

Its central plot is so formulaic, and the series so tentative in making any larger argument about how we alternately romanticize and abuse nature, that Untamed never bushwhacks its way into its own identity. The series’ first scene is a banger, and it’s all downhill from there.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this premise; it’s just fleshed out in the most hackneyed way possible. Turner is the kind of antihero detective we’ve seen a million times before. .... Untamed has a far more fascinating and multifaceted lead in Yosemite.