The Abandons

The Hollow Matriarchy

If the Western genre is a graveyard of American myths, *The Abandons* arrives carrying a shovel, intent on digging up the bones of Manifest Destiny to see if they still rattle. Kurt Sutter’s 1850s frontier saga promised a revisionist history written in the blood of matriarchs rather than the tobacco spit of cowboys. Yet, for all its mud-caked ambition and the heavyweight pairing of Lena Headey and Gillian Anderson, the series often feels like a Ferrari engine dropped into a covered wagon—powerful, loud, but rattling itself apart on the Oregon Trail.



The premise is less a narrative arc than a collision course. In the misty, lawless expanses of the Washington Territory, two dynasties are carved out of the wilderness. On one side stands Fiona Nolan (Headey), a devout Irish woman who has gathered a "family" of societal castoffs—orphans and outlaws bound by survival rather than blood. Opposing her is Constance Van Ness (Anderson), a silver-mining baroness whose silk dresses conceal a capitalism so predatory it borders on the gothic.

Visually, the series struggles to find a consistent pulse. Filmed in the sweeping plains of Alberta, the cinematography oscillates between breathtaking, painterly tableaus of the frontier and oddly claustrophobic, underlit interiors that betray the troubled production history. There are moments where the camera captures the sheer, terrifying isolation of the 1850s—the way the gray sky presses down on the characters like a physical weight. However, these are frequently undercut by editing that feels frantic, a symptom of the behind-the-scenes chaos that saw Sutter depart before the finale. The result is a world that feels dangerous, yes, but also curiously artificial, like a theme park ride where the animatronics have become sentient and violent.



The true tragedy of *The Abandons* is that its central conflict—the war of mothers—is its most compelling and yet most underutilized asset. Headey, channeling a weary, iron-willed survivalism, plays Fiona as a woman who has hollowed herself out to make room for others. It is a performance of quiet desperation, a stark contrast to Anderson’s operatic villainy. Anderson eats the scenery with a silver spoon, infusing Constance with a terrifying, icy stillness. When these two share the screen, the air leaves the room. They represent the two faces of the American frontier: the communal struggle for existence versus the individualistic hunger for empire.

However, the narrative is frequently hijacked by a sprawl of subplots involving their children—star-crossed lovers and brooding heirs who lack the gravitational pull of their mothers. The script burdens them with modern sensibilities and dialogue that occasionally clunks with anachronism, breaking the immersive spell. We are asked to care about the dynastic maneuvering of the next generation, but the show never quite convinces us that they are anything more than pawns in the matriarchs' deadly chess game.



Ultimately, *The Abandons* serves as a fascinating, frustrated artifact of the streaming era’s "prestige" ambition. It attempts to marry the pulp violence of *Sons of Anarchy* with the grandeur of *There Will Be Blood*, but often lands in a muddy middle ground. It is a series about the brutal cost of legacy that, ironically, struggles to define its own identity. While it fails to reinvent the Western, it succeeds as a showcase for two actresses who refuse to let the material defeat them, standing tall even as the narrative structure crumbles around them.