The Abandons

The High Cost of Empty Frontiers

There is a grim kind of pleasure in watching an expensive machine malfunction in public. *The Abandons* gives off that feeling almost immediately. I can't say with certainty what knocked Netflix's seven-episode Western off the rails, though Kurt Sutter's loud exit in the middle of production points in a fairly obvious direction. He later went to Instagram to accuse the streamer of choosing algorithmic safety over actual creative vision. Whatever the exact cause, the finished series feels like wreckage you can still smell burning. It has the surface of prestige drama, the budget of an event series, and the inner life of a soap that wandered onto a beautiful, very dusty set.



Set in the 1854 Washington Territory, the show pits two matriarchs against each other in the mining town of Angel's Ridge. Fiona Nolan, an Irish homesteader with a loose, makeshift family of adopted orphans, stands on one side. Constance Van Ness, an aristocratic mine owner determined to claim the silver beneath Fiona's land, stands on the other. On paper that's a terrific engine: *Yellowstone* filtered through a frontier blood feud. In practice it barely sputters. Judy Berman at *TIME* said the series "embodies everything that's frustrating about the medium right now," and the line stings because it fits. The stars are there. The tropes are in place. The thing just never quite lives.

The trouble isn't a lack of effort. You can see money and labor all over every frame. The trouble is that the show has no pulse. Watch the scenes inside the Van Ness manor. Gillian Anderson sweeps in as Constance with the icy assurance of somebody who believes she owns a room before stepping into it. Normally Anderson can make coldness feel electric. Here she seems pinned under the concept of the character. The jaw stays set, the shoulders barely shift, and Constance becomes less a person than a beautifully styled emblem of ruthless capitalism.



Lena Headey gets a little more air as Fiona because the role lets her get dirty. We've seen Headey play the ruthless queen before. Here she strips away the regal polish and leans into fatigue that feels bone-deep. There's a lovely beat in the third episode where Fiona looks out over her barren land, her body sagging just a fraction, and then an approaching rider appears and you can literally see the armor snap back into place. It's sharp, economical physical acting. I only wish the scripts gave her more chances like that instead of stuffing her mouth with clunky, anachronistic tough talk.

The post-production seams don't help. Episode lengths swing wildly—from a full hour to a breezy 35 minutes—and you can feel the panic in the cutting. Younger characters like Nick Robinson's painfully earnest Elias seem to wander into half-built arcs and then vanish again, as though a whole layer of connective tissue was carved out late.



We'll never know whether Sutter could have dragged this thing into shape. Netflix canceled the show less than a month after its December 2025 premiere, leaving viewers stranded on a sudden, bloody cliffhanger. Whether that feels tragic or merciful probably depends on your appetite for wasted potential. *The Abandons* spent a fortune building a world. It just forgot to fill it with living people.