‘Outer Range’s Biggest Mystery Is What Kind of Show It Wants to Be

Have you explored the Outer Range yet? Oh, it’s really something! It’s the saga of two warring ranching families in the great American west and a mysterious interloper who comes between them. It’s a down-home drama about small-town dreams and old-time religion. It’s a science-fiction mystery box about time portals and apocalyptic futures. It’s Yellowstone meets 3 Body Problem.

It’s a lot, and that’s the issue.

Outer Range’s biggest mystery is what kind of show Outer Range is — and what it wants to be. Created by Brian Watkins and helmed for its second season by Charles Murray, the sci-fi/paranormal Western can feel like a different genre from scene to scene, depending on who’s on screen.

As Royal Abbott, a time-displaced foundling turned unlikely family patriarch, Josh Brolin brings with him the same weather-beaten Western gravitas he’d already mastered by No Country for Old Men. At times Royal feels like Brolin’s No Country character Llewellyn Moss himself, just grown older and marginally wiser. Brolin is a riveting screen presence at this point; he has aged into stoic power as if one of the faces of Mount Rushmore descended, got a job in The Goonies, and had its famous hunk dad marry Barbra Streisand. He’s more for some people than others (there may be a gender divide here, with men responding to him more favorably than women, but I haven’t done enough research to say so conclusively), but for me he’s fascinating.

That’s a sharp contrast with Royal’s wife Cecilia. Despite being played by Lili Taylor, a stalwart of independent cinema and a ’90s alt icon, Cece’s shouty crisis of faith feels more bible study group than biblical, so to speak. It’s hard to care about her shouting “God is gone! God is gone!” when some unknown force used Cronos’s knife to slice a hole in reality a few miles away.

Cece’s down-to-earth spiritual struggle in turn feels a million miles removed from the show’s more outlandish elements. These include Royal’s rancher rival, millionaire madman Wayne Tillerson (Will Patton), and his bizarre lodger and frenemy — and, quite possibly, lost and grown-up granddaughter — the mystic visionary Autumn (Imogen Poots). Wayne and Autumn are each over-the-top in the sometimes-entertaining, sometimes-exhausting manner of a Garth Ennis comic book, or a series based on one, like Preacher or The Boys. Both their affect and their entertainment value can vary wildly, though I must admit Wayne earned my undying admiration when he revealed himself to be the owner of several original Nan Goldin photographs.

But you can be weird in a way more unnerving and exciting fashion. Wayne’s youngest surviving son and heir apparent Billy (Noah Reid), though, starts off a jock asshole with an incongruously beautiful tenor singing voice and a penchant for great female vocalists. But through exposure to the mind-altering mineral associated with the time portals, he slowly morphs into the kind of blissed-out mental mutant you’d find in a Nicholas Winding Refn show, like Too Old to Die Young or Copenhagen Cowboy. Billy could have wandered right off the set of one of these showcases of sensuous sociopathy and no one would be the wiser.

Royal and Cece’s son Perry is played by Tom Pelphrey. If you’ve watched Ozark, that’s probably reason enough to tune in: Pelphrey played Ben Davis, the bipolar brother of Laura Linney’s calculating co-protagonist Wendy Byrde. In the course of that performance he delivered a monologue so full of panic and pain it threatens to sear your screen. Happily, Pelphrey brings that same intensity to his performance as Perry, a mild-mannered guy who you nonetheless fully believe could kill a man with a single shot to the windpipe. That torn, frayed, at-the-end-of-his rope mentality is mesmerizing. 

The same can’t be said of his sibling Rhett (Lewis Pullman). Rhett is a regional rodeo champ, involved in a stuttering romance with his old high school crush Maria (Isabel Arraiza). Maria is a veterinary school dropout who works as a bank teller. Somehow, this whirlwind romance is supposed to compete for our attention with the time-traveling cowboy fighting for control of a hole in the space/time continuum against an insane cattle baron and one of Hollywood’s most beautiful thirtysomethings. They don’t stack up.

So what kind of show is Outer Range, then? A neo-Western befitting Josh Brolin? A science-fiction mystery box in the Westworld mode? A meemaw-and-papaw-friendly melodrama in cowboy boots?

Somehow, incoming showrunner Charles Murray needs to take all these different pieces and put together a cohesive puzzle. The fact that the first season held back basically all information about the hole except “it’s Time,” a frustrating move in and of itself, may end up serving him well in this regard: He can effectively set the rules as he sees fit. Maybe Murray can grab ahold of the show’s science-fiction reins and harness the full horsepower of all of the show’s characters, not just a chosen few, driving them into a more promising pasture further down the road.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.