Who hasn't wished there was a hole in the ground into which one could throw one's worries, hardships and burdensome things?
Such a hole appears in Brian Watkins' Amazon series "Outer Range" on the land of rancher Royal Abbott (Josh Brolin).
But things don't just want to disappear into it.
Outer Range is a contemporary western, and it starts out like a variation on Kevin Costner's epic Yellowstone.
Much like the Duttons in Montana, the Abbott family -- alongside Royal, his wife Cecilia (Lily Taylor), sons Perry (Tom Pelphrey) and Rhett (Lewis Pullman), and Perry's young daughter Amy (Olive Abercrombie) -- in Wyoming wrestles with past and threatened future losses.
Amy's mother, Rebecca, disappeared months ago, and Sheriff Joy (Tamara Podemski), an Indigenous lawman facing special challenges before re-election, intends to stop searching for her.
Royal must defend his lands from neighboring rancher Wayne Tillerson (Will Patton, also seen in "Yellowstone")
who considers the western pastures of the Abbott ranch to be his property - that's where the dark hole has opened up, of whose existence apparently only Royal knows at first.
But the mysterious young Autumn (Imogen Poots), a hippie vagabond that Royal rather reluctantly lets camp on his land, thinks she can locate something very special here.
Chaos to the bitter end
Indeed, the scenery in this series, captured by cinematographers Drew Daniels, Jay Keitel and Adam Newport-Berra, is vast, exhilarating, terrifying.
Watkins, a young playwright presenting his first TV series here, told Metacritic that he himself grew up in the landscapes of the American West "that shape inner landscapes."
Man's dominance over nature is a laughable illusion here, and it's obvious that Cormack McCarthy and Sam Shepard are among Watkins' formative influences.
Far from being benevolent and romantic, nature here stands in cold contrast to the characters' efforts to make sense of things.
At the beginning of the third episode, an almost biblical montage unfolds: Mountains and valleys, forests and herds of animals grow out of the turbulent primordial soup; they arise and perish just like people.
"There were storms and seasons and fences and blood and miracles and revenge and regrets," says Royal Abbott offscreen.
"And the land and the sky didn't give a shit." And that damn hole doesn't offer salvation either, as might be the case in other science fiction plays.
Rather, it acts as a symbol of an era in which there seems to be no more refuge,
in which all certainties dissolve and supposedly stable structures are subjected to inexorable change.
"Have you ever wondered," Royal Abbott tells Sheriff Joy, "if the world isn't what you think it is?
No law, no order, just chaos to the bitter end.” And yet he has no choice but to come to terms with the forces at work, protect his family and his country – and make a deal with Autumn , who knows too much and can upset the fragile balance Abbott struggles to maintain with a single gesture.
"Outer Range" has a lot to offer - the game of Josh Brolin and Will Patton, for example, who contrast each other as two very different characters.
Patton's Tillerson is a manic old man, furrowed by a failed marriage and declining health, who feeds on the dark energy of an evil magician.
Brolins Abbott is a quiet, no-nonsense fellow whose hard shell can barely hide his inner turmoil at the absence of any moral fabric in the world.
The story condenses with dramatic developments into a thriller that reveals its secrets in the first four episodes in a well-dosed manner.
Above all, however, the series creates a fascinating atmosphere of diffuse uncertainty, in which neither humility nor arrogance are able to soothe the chaos,
and even God obviously doesn't give a fuck about his creatures' struggle to keep their nerves.
In a graceful prayer, Abbott rages in his uncertainty about the mysterious hole.
“There is a great distance between us, a great emptiness,” he addresses his creator.
"I challenge you to fill this void.
I'm asking you to fill this void!” Meanwhile, the Tillersons next door are ecstatically embracing the breakup of the world: the youngest of the three Tillerson sons, Billy (Noah Reid), belts out pop songs in front of the mirror in his underwear, and Patriarch Wayne acts like a mad shaman in a dialogue with a buffalo head.
In a graceful prayer, Abbott rages in his uncertainty about the mysterious hole.
“There is a great distance between us, a great emptiness,” he addresses his creator.
"I challenge you to fill this void.
I'm asking you to fill this void!” Meanwhile, the Tillersons next door are ecstatically embracing the breakup of the world: the youngest of the three Tillerson sons, Billy (Noah Reid), belts out pop songs in front of the mirror in his underwear, and Patriarch Wayne acts like a mad shaman in a dialogue with a buffalo head.
In a graceful prayer, Abbott rages in his uncertainty about the mysterious hole.
“There is a great distance between us, a great emptiness,” he addresses his creator.
"I challenge you to fill this void.
I'm asking you to fill this void!” Meanwhile, the Tillersons next door are ecstatically embracing the breakup of the world: the youngest of the three Tillerson sons, Billy (Noah Reid), belts out pop songs in front of the mirror in his underwear, and Patriarch Wayne acts like a mad shaman in a dialogue with a buffalo head.
"Outer Range" takes up the uncertainty that the pandemic and signs of political and social dissolution have caused to a large extent.
But the series refuses any cynicism.
She creates an idiosyncratic view of human existence from the poetic combination of disparate genres and also tells an exciting thriller.
Let's hope that the eight-part series, of which Amazon publishes two episodes every week, has a happy ending.
Outer Range
runs on Amazon Prime.