Amazon’s Outer Range brings Twin Peaks to Yellowstone
With its vast, empty spaces under crackling skies big enough to keep a secret, the American West is a natural setting for high strangeness. Roswell and Skinwalker Ranch both occupy the dusty desert Southwest. But Amazon’s new series Outer Range moves the action further north to Wyoming, for a sci-fi Western drama that blends Yellowstone and The Outer Limits with just a dash of Twin Peaks. Now, the shifting tones implied by such a mixture don’t always connect. In fact, they can feel quite disjointed. But given that Outer Range is very much of the uncanny school of sci-fi, re-fashioning classic Western tropes — the mysterious drifter, the shootout on main street — to enigmatic ends, perhaps some off-putting qualities are appropriate.
Outer Range comes to Amazon with an impeccable pedigree: It’s the second series made under Oscar-winning production company Plan B’s first-look deal with Amazon — the first being Barry Jenkins’The Underground Railroad. The more woo-woo aspects of Outer Range are presumably influenced by consulting producer and EP Amy Seimetz, whose 2020 film She Dies Tomorrow is similarly inscrutable. (Although they weren’t involved with the production, there are shades of a Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead concept in the show as well.) Series creator and showrunner Brian Watkins, meanwhile, is a celebrated playwright, whose 2015Wyoming similarly dealt with unspeakable family secrets on the open range.
And before it can dive face-first into the inscrutable, Outer Range has a prestige ranching drama to attend to. Josh Brolin stars as Royal Abbott, the laconic patriarch of a ranching and rodeo clan. The Abbotts are the type of family where no one ever says what they really mean, but they’re bound tightly
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