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.