‘The Abandons’ is a sudsy soap opera dressed up in spurs and a cowboy hat

You will never get lost watching The Abandons.

True, Netflix’s new Western series throws a lot of characters at you in its first few minutes.

There’s Constance (Gillian Anderson), the steely widowed matriarch of the Van Nesses, a rich mining family in the Washington Territory of the 1850s. She’s got two obnoxiously entitled sons, Willem (Toby Hemingway) and Garret (Lucas Till) and a pretty, sensitive daughter Trisha (Aisling Franciosi). The wealth of the Van Ness mines ensures that she’s got the town’s mayor (Patton Oswalt(!)) and sheriff (Marc Menchaca) under her thumb, and she’s got a pair of enforcers to do her dirty work (Michael Greyeyes, Michiel Huisman).

Which turns out to be important, because those mines are running dry, and Constance has her eye on a patch of real estate owned by poor cattle-rancher Fiona (Lena Headey), another steely matriarch. Fiona heads up her own found family of misfits on a ranch called The Abandons, including the headstrong Dahlia (Diana Silvers), the wary Lilla Belle (Natalia del Riego) and the sweet, doe-eyed Elias (Nick Robinson). Toss into the mix some fellow settlers (Lamar Johnson, Ryan Hurst, and a handful of others) and you got yourself a teeming ensemble of players.

This being the Old West, more than one of the above-mentioned characters don’t make it through the first couple episodes. But the rest get enough screentime to progress through their own storylines, their own tiny, bespoke narrative arcs, over the course of the show’s seven-episode season. (Constance’s daughter and Fiona’s son, for example, waste little time getting their stars crossed, because of course they do.) The series also teems with various factions vying for power — bandits and Native Americans and townsfolk and the military — each with its own competing motivation.

That is all, admittedly, a whole lot to keep track of, so you’d be forgiven for worrying that you might need to hie your butt online to find a wiki that’ll help keep you oriented from scene to scene, episode to episode.

But this is 2025, and streamers like Netflix are reportedly concerned about you being on your phone while watching their content, so they’ve put certain protocols in place.

How else to explain why the characters on The Abandons can be counted upon to say — to announce, really — exactly what’s on their mind, in its entirety, the very moment it occurs to them? Sometimes they repeat themselves for good measure. So adjust your expectations: If you go into The Abandons knowing that things like subtext, unvoiced implications and nuance won’t be showing up, you’ll never miss them.

You might be watching an episode and notice a character telling another character what’s about to happen, right before it dutifully happens. Afterwards — count on it — a character will get a moment to describe everything that you just watched happen. (The Abandons is not remotely unique, by the way; once you get attuned to it you’ll start to notice it happening, to a greater or lesser extent, on most series that are currently streaming.)

Presumably that’s the nervous nellies at Netflix (and other networks) instructing their writers rooms to hold your hand and walk you through their episodic content. Yes, it’s annoying, but it helps to clarify something about The Abandons in particular.

On the surface it’s a gorgeous, hardscrabble Western, awash in stark landscapes, grubby faces, bar fights and banditry. But that’s window-dressing. Scratch away the grime with a fingernail, and you expose the pure, glitzy soap opera beneath. Oh, sure, it looks tough, brutal, merciless, dad-coded, like American Primeval. But at heart?

It’s Dynasty.

Consider: The Abandons is only an ensemble on paper; in execution, it’s a show about Anderson and Headey’s icy, powerful, hard-hearted women, Constance and Fiona. Constance wants Fiona’s land, Fiona refuses to sell. This sets off an escalating series of events that give Anderson and Headey plenty of opportunities to share the screen, trading venomous barbs and unleashing thinly veiled threats at each other, while members of their respective families, in varying combinations, clash (and smash).

There’s intrigue, betrayal, revenge and plenty of petty schemes. Buried secrets come to light, as they must. And while I would never spoil the scene in which the season-long rivalry between Constance and Fiona reaches its inevitable climax, I’ll just note that the only thing missing from it is a lily pond.

This soapiness, I hasten to note, is not a bad thing — it’s good. It’s fun. Headey is terrific as a woman who does bad things for what she only barely manages to convince herself are good reasons, and Anderson is giving Iron Lady badassery (literally — she’s busting out her throaty Maggie Thatcher whisper from The Crown, minus the plummy vowels). Her Constance does bad things too, mostly because well … she’s a bad person. Remember what I said above, about nuance, comma, the utter lack of? Yeah.

The show dutifully provides her motivations to do the nasty things she does, but those motivations are rooted in greed and hatred. The story of The Abandons is a series of black-and-white conflicts unfolding in a stark, Manichean universe. In Fiona we get a flawed hero, in Constance, a hiss-worthy villain.

Which would seem to suggest, of course, a classic Good-defeats-Evil ending, but that’s not what we get here. In fact, we get no kind of ending at all. The seventh and final episode ends on a cliffhanger.

That said, it’s all but impossible to begrudge that lack of resolution, because the episode preceding it is constructed with such care and confidence. The tension ratchets up, scene by scene, in a way that feels clean, assured and ruthlessly efficient. It just works.

And so does The Abandons, kind of — as long as you’re okay with getting some suds in your saddle.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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