‘The Abandons’ Review: Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey Can’t Save This Uneven Western (Netflix)

Amid a modest—yet genuinely welcome—revival of the western thanks to streaming platforms, along comes The Abandons, one of Netflix’s more ambitious recent projects. Created by the man behind Sons of Anarchy and headlined by two icons of what we used to call “the small screen”—Gillian Anderson (The X-Files) and Lena Headey (Game of Thrones)—the series arrives with serious star power. You’d expect one of the year’s major releases. Instead, what we get is a strangely assembled mix of thriller and something closer to a family melodrama.

What stands out most is that this is a western driven by women, something still fairly uncommon for a genre that has mostly relegated them to supporting roles. Here, Anderson and Headey play two very different women locked in a simmering rivalry. Anderson is essentially the town’s power broker, a woman who controls nearly everything in Angel’s Ridge, Oregon. Headey plays a tough, long-suffering outsider raising four adopted children—the “abandoned” ones who give the series its title. The two women are already at odds when the series begins, and the showdown is about to explode.

Headey is Fiona Nolan, an Irish widow who lives with her adopted children on land rich in silver. Constance Van Ness (Anderson) wants that land and the wealth beneath it, but Fiona refuses to sell or negotiate. One night, a mysterious attack on Fiona’s property devastates her livestock and ends in tragedy. That’s the spark that ignites the war. Fiona has her four adult children—Elias (Nick Robinson), Dahlia (Diana Silvers), Albert Mason (Lamar Johnson), and Lilla Belle (Natalia del Riego)—as well as a couple of neighboring families willing to stand with her. Van Ness has her three children—Willem (Toby Henderson), Garret (Lucas Till), and Trisha (Aisling Franciosi)—plus a squad of loyal, long-standing (and not-so-long-standing) employees ready to do whatever dirty work is required.

Things escalate when a drunken Willem attempts to assault Dahlia, only to be killed in the struggle by Dahlia and Fiona, with neighbors witnessing the incident. To avoid a family massacre, they decide to hide the body. Constance, suspicious, sends people to investigate. The first episode focuses mostly on these two setups and prepares viewers for what’s ahead: a long, tangled chain of violent clashes between the rival clans. Structurally, the show feels rooted in old-school network TV—the world creator Kurt Sutter grew up in—where each episode adds a new conflict that widens the feud. And somewhere in the middle of all the hostility, Elias and Trisha exchange meaningful glances, hinting at a possible Romeo and Juliet detour.

What looks on paper like a fresh fusion of classic frontier conflict and female-driven family drama gradually loses shape. The storytelling is too episodic, the dialogue either overly expository or overly solemn, and the attention to detail wobbles more than once. The burden falls on the two leads, who do what they can while juggling shifting accents, characters defined in overly simple strokes (Fiona: good; Constance: very bad), and a plot featuring its share of twists—there’s a striking one in Episode 2—though not much imagination behind them.

The production also carries behind-the-scenes baggage. Sutter walked away halfway through production back in 2023, reportedly over creative disagreements with Netflix. The original ten episodes became seven—most around forty minutes—and the pacing reflects the turmoil, often jumping abruptly between story beats. The series, paradoxically, moves slowly when building character (both stars get plenty of speechifying) but then jumps into action quickly, even abruptly. There’s a potential reading about political and economic power concentrated in a few hands, about disregard for Indigenous or Latino communities, but the show barely engages with it. Instead, it devotes more attention to its religious angle—central to the devout Fiona—which is meant to serve as her moral compass.

This is a western that won’t reinvent the genre and that, beyond placing women at the forefront, doesn’t offer anything particularly new—certainly nothing on the level of Godless or the recent American Primeval. It aims more for the Yellowstone playbook (think 1883) with its blend of action and heightened family drama. But Sutter doesn’t navigate that terrain as confidently as Taylor Sheridan does. Or perhaps he knew exactly what he wanted and simply couldn’t convince Netflix to let him make it. Either way, what remains is a serviceable, moderately entertaining series that will likely be remembered as little more than a missed opportunity.