The Abandons: a Western series abandoned to its own devices

1854, the fictional town of Angel's Ridge, in the heart of the Old West. Fiona Nolan is a widowed Irish immigrant who, together with her late husband, built a family by adopting orphans and outcasts. Her greatest rival is Constance Van Ness, a wealthy matriarch who also survived her beloved, and who controls the powerful mining empire in the area. An intense conflict arises between them when both claim rights to the same land, which hides a precious silver deposit.

In The Abandons, the rivalry intensifies further when revenge, intrigue, and a forbidden relationship threaten to upset all balance. Tensions explode when Willem, Constance's second son, sexually assaults Dahlia, and she kills him in self-defense. Complicating the situation is the clandestine love story between Elias, Fiona's eldest son, and Trisha, Constance's daughter, while the two matriarchs are increasingly determined to permanently eliminate the enemy "house."

The Abandons: expectations and reality

Never a more prophetic title – and in the following lines, we will discover why – The Abandons represents the latest television project by Kurt Sutter, the creator of the cult series Sons of Anarchy, who here wanted to bring almost theatrical power dynamics into a Western context: a project that on paper had all the ingredients to become one of the most interesting in recent years. The presence in the main roles of two iconic small-screen actresses like Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey also seemed to guarantee the necessary dose of female charisma for a story centered on the confrontation between two women in command.

Yet the final result is an often contradictory operation, which looks at the frontier with an unbalanced perspective, trying to insert both tributes to archetypal situations and elements of novelty, giving life to an operation undecided on what it really wants to tell.

The series was ordered by Netflix in October 2022 with the initial intention of making ten hour-long episodes, but something went wrong during production, with Sutter himself abandoning the project mid-way due to irreconcilable differences with the platform, which had not particularly appreciated the pilot episode, considered too long for streaming audiences. And this situation is especially felt in the ending, which, leaving a very open conclusion on the actual fates of the main characters, would desperately need a Season 2, which has not yet been announced and is quite unlikely given the premises. The risk that The Abandons will remain an incomplete story without a real conclusion is high, a factor that could lead many viewers not to even attempt watching it.

What shines but isn't enough

Amidst the production chaos, the two protagonists try to save what can be saved. Lena Headey, the British actress who entered the collective imagination thanks to her portrayal of Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones, brings a substantial Fiona Nolan to the screen, a character full of ambiguity ready to do anything to protect the people she loves and the land she believes is hers by right. At the same time, Gillian Anderson, the legendary Dana Scully from The X-Files, infuses the right torment into the figure, more complex than she appears, of the rough Constance Van Ness, also a mother searching for answers about the fate of her missing son.

Female gazes in a setting classically dominated by patriarchal dynamics, which here take over an otherwise fluctuating and overly numerous cast, with a myriad of subplots that, instead of enriching the narrative fabric, end up unnecessarily weighing it down.

From a staging perspective, The Abandons benefits from the suggestive charm of Canadian locations. The plains of Alberta, with their endless expanses, mountains on the horizon, and the particular quality of light that characterizes the North American territory, offer an aesthetically sumptuous backdrop that recalls the great Westerns of the past. The period reconstruction is also good, with sets built for the occasion that transport us to a credible West, among saloons where brawls are commonplace and small churches where sinners seek forgiveness for lies and misdeeds of various kinds.

Moreover, it will soon be understood that no one can truly claim to be innocent, with practically every main and secondary character hiding a secret or being guilty of some betrayal, following that modern approach where the canonical confrontation between Good and Evil has been replaced by that moral filth that corrupts the hearts of all, without distinction.