Outer Range review: An arty, deliberately opaque sci-fi series impaired by déjà vu elements

Language: English

There appears to be a great big void in the new Amazon series Outer Range. No, I’m not talking about the mysterious hole in the ground that appears early in the show, driving much of its intrigue, while offering precious little in exchange for your faith and curiosity. Though that hole is also referred to as ‘the void’, I’m talking more about the existential crisis of the show itself.  

What? Why? Who? And the odd ‘Why should I even…?’ The questions pile on throughout. The answers to them may offer a sharp twist or three on the odd occasion, but it otherwise prefers to remain dense and inscrutable for as long as it can stretch it.

Created by Brian Watkins, I wouldn’t fault Outer Range with its set-up and ambition. It expects Josh Brolin to do much of the heavy lifting for the longest, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Brolin plays Royal Abbott, patriarch of a ranch family in Wyoming. This family isn’t in the greatest place currently, each battling their own demons, not to mention their financial troubles. But they do stand by each other as long as they can.

Multiple seemingly unrelated things happen around the same time in the first episode, kicking off proceedings. Royal loses two of his cattle somewhere on his vast family ranch. The search for them leads to him discovering the void somewhere out on the massive property by accident. He instantly realizes that this isn’t something created by the ‘nature’ that he is familiar with.

Meanwhile, his neighbours - the far wealthier Tillersons - are also now claiming that 600 acres of Abbott land actually belongs to them by law, and they want it back asap. (It might have something to do with mining or land rights, Royal feels.) And finally, a young woman named Autumn (Imogen Poots) turns up on his property, seeking a spot to simply camp out. She is wealthy and offers money in exchange, something Royal clearly isn’t in a position to say no to. Oh, and there’s a cow that appears out of the blue with no explanation, with arrows stuck in its side. This fellow turns up and then disappears frequently through the show. It’s the sort of deliberate obfuscation you’re supposed to make your peace with, and it is the sort of the thing that the show repeatedly resorts to.

Take for instance the very monologue the show opens with, which is repeated again later. It pertains to Kronos from Greek mythology. While Kronos is associated with plenty of odd behaviour, perhaps his most significant relevance to us is from that fact that his name gave our lexicon the word ‘chronology’. Okay then, the mysteries on the show probably have something to do with time. Even the night cinematography on the show, which is rather frequent, seems deliberately murky to the point where sometimes you can’t even make out what exactly is happening. A pity, because some of the day cinematography is striking. The shadowy temporal angle on the show is something that many writers have fiddled with, though only Netflix’s Dark managed to balance relatable stakes with outsize ambition, making things convoluted but remaining coherent from a macro perspective all at once.

Outer Range seems to borrow many things from Dark. Here too, there are family ties at the heart of it. There’s the stab at visual flair, the eerie background score, the perplexing shifts of time and perspective.

In fact, Outer Range often gave me the impression of being modelled very much on Dark, but targeted at those who may have been unwilling to take all the intellectual and emotional leaps that the German show expected of its audience.

If the show manages to hold your attention, it probably is because of Brolin and his baritone. No matter what movie and what role, I find it hard to not take him seriously and be firmly on his side. (There’s a good chance this unconditional Brolin love is just me, but the actor’s magnetic presence is undeniable.) There are a few other intriguing characters on the show, like the queer Indigenous sheriff in town, or even Autumn herself, though it takes a while before her presence starts to actually add something to the plot, instead of merely appearing as yet another enigmatic distraction.

There is, of course, the larger issue with content fatigue. More often than not, shows today seem to borrow wholesale from earlier works either deliberately or unconsciously. These may be hard to spot while they are making it, but binge-watching audiences will likely be better off at recognising these similarities. Even a terrific show like Severance  couldn’t escape it, so Outer Range is no exception. You may or may not always be able to pinpoint the origin of the déjà vu, but the overhanging sense of having seen this before is almost inescapable. The show is rewarding in spurts, but there’s a lot of shady clutter you’ve to sit through to get to those bits. There is a certain kind of patient content-phile audience I would recommend Outer Range to, but before I do that I would first attempt to gauge just how much they like Josh Brolin.

Outer Range is streaming on Amazon Prime Video

Pradeep Menon is a Mumbai-based writer and independent filmmaker.

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