The Abandons Review 2025 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Since completing his breakout drama series “Sons of Anarchy” in 2014, Kurt Sutter has had a hard time finishing what he starts. After one season, the writer-producer beat FX to the punch by self-canceling his low-rated and poorly reviewed follow-up show, “The Bastard Executioner,” before being ousted from the “Sons of Anarchy” spinoff “Mayans M.C.” prior to Season 3 in the wake of cast and crew complaints of a hostile work environment.
Despite initially blaming Disney for “creative scrutiny” so over-the-top he “feared for the creative future of storytelling,” Sutter’s first foray outside of FX hasn’t gone any better. Netflix’s “The Abandons,” a period Western about two rival families warring over land in the mid-1850s, didn’t even finish production with its creator, writer, and showrunner still on board. Sutter left his own series with just three weeks left in production amid reports that his initial 100-minute pilot caused Netflix executives to question the show’s direction. Reshoots were ordered, the original 10 episodes were cut down to seven, and the resulting first season is so hollowed out (four of the seven episodes clock in under 39 minutes), it’s difficult to tell what greater ambition the series might’ve once sought.
Still, what’s alarming about “The Abandons” — which ranks up there with Joss Whedon’s “The Nevers” as titles so bad they act as their own harbingers of doom — isn’t confined to what happened behind the scenes, but also how it feels to actually watch it.
The released footage carries all the markings of a carved-up turkey, from fleeting, inexplicable appearances from recognizable cast members to vexingly incomplete sequences. And yet, context aside, “The Abandons” often feels like standard-fare streaming slop: Shallow arcs are stretched past their breaking points, clichés are deployed faster and more freely than bullets in a shootout, and the talented leads are mainly there to convince viewers what they’re saying is worth taking seriously. (Or, even more cynically, to make things easy on Netflix’s vaunted algorithm. “If you liked Gillian Anderson in ‘Sex Education’…” please don’t watch “The Abandons.”)
Anderson stars as Constance Van Ness, a wealthy widow whose lucrative mining operation drives the local economy. Ruthless and respectable, Constance is the face of early American capitalism: a woman so blinded by her wealth she’ll order people killed in the morning and then spend her evening arguing the land she’s after isn’t about money; it’s a matter of “survival.”
This land is known as Jasper Hollow, an expansive ranch near Constance’s mines that Fiona Nolan (Lena Headey) currently calls home. The former nanny was gifted her little slice of heaven by her late employer as thanks for nursing him back to health once. (He died later, from something else, I guess.) Now, she lives there with her grown, adopted children, Elias (Nick Robinson) and Dahlia Teller (Diana Silvers), Albert Mason (Lamar Johnson), and Lilla Belle (Natalia Del Riego).
When the story begins, Constance has been harassing Fiona for more than a year. She made multiple offers to buy Jasper Hollow and, once rejected, resorted to less diplomatic means of procurement. For instance, one morning Fiona wakes to discover her cattle is out of their pen and being steered by masked cowboys toward a cliff. Her family’s quick actions save most of the herd, but they’re helpless to keep Constance from squeezing the ranch again tomorrow, or the next day, or the one after that, until Fiona hands over her land or dies trying to hold onto it.
In their respective stances toward family and life, Fiona and Constance represent two disparate yet overlapping visions of the American way. Constance prioritizes her own family over anyone and anything else. She cares about the community only as far as it continues to support her economic “needs,” and her only way forward in life is via perpetual expansion. (Ah, capitalism.) Fiona puts her family first, too, but to her — an Irish immigrant invited in by strangers — family is an inclusive status that’s earned rather than inherited. Such a malleable interpretation infuriates Constance, who repeatedly screams about being a “true mother” compared to Fiona, who’s merely a fraud.
Here, though, the cracks in “The Abandons” start to show. Constance, for the most part, is a cartoon villain lent legitimacy by Anderson’s commanding presence (although anyone with an ear for accents won’t find her performance quite as convincing). So why are there contradictory scenes emphasizing her kindness and generosity, like when she finds the local kids a proper school teacher? They don’t fit next to the many more scenes of her torturing and murdering people (including young women), and the rest of her arc doesn’t justify an understanding of Constance any deeper than the black hat she often sports. Might they be glimpses of a more well-rounded character left on the cutting room floor, who only exists now as a ghostly implication? Who’s to say, but it’s a sin of omission that strikes too often, rendering the ensemble flat and bizarre rather than sturdy and complex.
Other perplexing abnormalities include an abrupt scene where Headey’s antiheroine starts shouting at God so suddenly you nearly miss the blasphemy; Patton Oswalt popping up just long enough for you to think, “Hey, is that Patton Oswalt?” before he disappears sans explanation; then there are the sparsely populated battles, mixed metaphors, and inconsistent levels of violence. At one point, a horse and rider jump over a ravine, and the rider is pulled to safety, but the horse just… vanishes. You have to assume the poor steed fell to its death, but not a word is lent toward confirming as much, let alone a shot of the fallen stallion. Lest you think I’m angling to see more bloody corpses onscreen, the series still makes time to watch a man fall from the top of a mountain to his splat on a rock. You can almost hear the accountants arguing over which special effects shots they’re willing to pay for.
“The Abandons,” clearly, was just dumped on Netflix to justify its cost, and the finale’s perfunctory cliffhanger all but confirms it. As the credits roll, it’s easy to imagine an executive sighing and saying, “Welp, good enough.” Yet looking back now, with a few hours hindsight, the series doesn’t feel all that unique. Sutter’s show, if you can still call it that, is demonstrably worse than plenty of recent television, but it’s not markedly inferior to a number of programs whose creative team sticks around from start to finish.
I didn’t hate myself for watching “The Abandons” like I did after finishing Ryan Murphy’s latest “Monster.” I didn’t question my sanity in the same way “The Morning Show” makes me do every single season. And I’m not convinced it’s any more deleterious to popular culture than the junky, smooth-brained “content” regularly churned out and immediately forgotten, a la “Untamed,” “The Sandman,” and “The Waterfront.” Maybe it lacks the polish provided by their financial resources, but the end result is close enough to join their undistinguished (and indistinguishable) club.
Despite its contentious creation, the true tragedy of “The Abandons” is that even in pieces, it still serves the same function as all those other shows: to make slop so prevalent, viewers won’t be able to separate the bad from the abandoned.
