The Abandons promises us the mother-off of a century. In one corner, we have Gillian Anderson in wide-brimmed black hats, skinny ties, and leather gloves; a bite of imperious, capitalist frost whose every sentence is delivered with a disdained curl of the lip. In the other corner, we have Lena Headey with farmhand braids in her hair and an Irish brogue on her tongue; the weight of the world weighing heavy on her brow, making her easy in her love, but formidable in her resentment.
We’re in Angel’s Ride in the Washington Territory. The year is 1854. Anderson’s Constance Van Ness owns the local silver mine. But profits are down, and her primary investor (THE Cornelius Vanderbilt, of the Vanderbilt dynasty), has threatened to pull out if things don’t turn around soon. So, Constance has started sniffing around Jasper Hollow, where she suspects more silver might lie, but which also happens to be where Headey’s Fiona Nolan and a small community of outcasts (the titular Abandons) have made their home. They won’t take the payout. So, Constance gets her hands dirty.
We have, in short, a matriarchal Hatfields & McCoys on our hands. It’s an eat-the-rich saloon shootout, with an added, marauding grizzly bear in the mix and a less welcome adherence to the genre’s insistence on sexual violence as a way to establish the era’s ruthlessness. Still, it’s an easy sell, and every moment Anderson and Headey share on screen hits like a trumpet blast. Another character reports on one of their confrontations by emerging into a room and announcing, “the mothers are finished”. You can almost hear the hungry click of screenshots and “save to camera roll”s. I’m sure many a WhatsApp group will be graced with the line in the coming weeks.
Yet there is, counterintuitively, very little actual mothering-off happening in The Abandons. It’s quick to establish these two women as symbolic figureheads of early America’s war of ideals, even if Fiona’s insistence that “God gave us this home and only God can take it away” is never interrogated in terms of who might have called that land home before the European colonisers rocked up (too much, I think, to ask of what is ultimately a Taylor Sheridan, Yellowstone-wannabe).
But, then, almost as soon as the stakes are established, we’re distracted with a weakly plotted Romeo and Juliet romance between two of the opposing kin: Constance’s daughter Trisha (Aisling Franciosi), who cares for Schubert and not for marriage, and Fiona’s adopted son Elias (Nick Robinson), a nice guy who can barely get a sentence out.
It’s structurally promising: Constance’s two sons seem to represent the two malicious hands of power, one wild (Toby Hemingway) and one ordered (Lucas Till). While Fiona herself can’t conceive, she’s not only taken Elias under her wing, but his twin Dahlia (Diana Silvers), Albert (Lamar Johnson), the son of a Black schoolteacher, and Lilla (Natalia del Riego), a young Lakota Sioux woman.
Sadly, none of these characters are developed to a degree where they feel real. There’s an odd plot point where we think Albert is about to take more of a centre stage, only for him to be reduced back to ammunition for Constance and Fiona, as they both sling accusations of racism at each other. There’s a resistance force of the local Cayuse rumbling in the background, Mexican bandits, and an Irish Catholic priest—but it’s all set-dressing, really.
The Abandons feels incomplete, to the point its finale plays less like a cliffhanger and more like Netflix forgot to upload the last few episodes. There’s an explanation for this: its showrunner, Kurt Sutter (of Sons of Anarchy fame), parted ways with the project after the streaming giant was reportedly shown a rough cut of the series, with extensive reshoots ordered and a planned ten episodes cut down to seven. Who knows exactly where the point of contention was but, from this vantage point, it appears the mothering came up short.
