‘The Madison’ Review: Michelle Pfeiffer Anchors Taylor Sheridan’s Fish-Out-of-Water Drama in Montana (Paramount+)

There are two ways into the world of The Madison. One is to take it as a classic fish-out-of-water drama, in which a person—or a group of people—has to adapt to life in a place whose rules they don’t understand, and where they keep getting everything wrong. The other is to see it as a staging of what people like to call “the culture war.” Not the particularly vicious version currently dominating public life, but a more traditional one: the divide between countryside and city, between people from small towns and those from major capitals, between those raised close to nature and those who panic at the sight of a wasp. Add to that the generational angle: adults who know what life requires versus younger people who think they know everything but, in fact, know very little.

Careful not to bring overt politics into the mix, the series created by Taylor Sheridan puts that debate front and center by sending its central family—extremely wealthy New Yorkers—to live, or at least spend some time, in a cabin lost in a breathtaking but remote stretch of Montana. Stacy Clyburn (Michelle Pfeiffer) is a woman of comfortable means who lives in Manhattan, moving from charity events to afternoon tea with friends. Her husband Preston (Kurt Russell) spends his free time and vacations at that Montana cabin, where his brother Paul (Matthew Fox, looking quite a few years older than he did in Lost) lives. It’s the place Preston loves most in the world, but one Stacy, a committed city dweller, has no interest in setting foot in. Phone calls are good enough.

Back in Manhattan is the rest of the family: their daughters Abby (Beau Garrett) and Paige (Elle Chapman), and Abby’s two daughters—Stacy’s granddaughters—since Abby has recently gone through a divorce. Also in the mix is Russell (Patrick J. Adams), Paige’s husband, a rather ineffectual guy whom his intense and somewhat dim wife treats poorly. When, midway through the first episode, an unthinkable tragedy shakes everyone’s lives, Stacy and the family must head to Montana to deal with practical matters, face the consequences, and try to close a painful chapter in their lives. Or perhaps—who knows—give themselves the chance to start over somewhere very different.

With a superb performance by Pfeiffer—who has been steadily returning to screens in both series and films—The Madison could have been a terrific show about a woman trying to rebuild her life in a place she barely knows or understands. Stripped of the comforts of New York’s upper-class lifestyle and forced to, quite literally, use an outhouse or a stable as a bathroom, the series has plenty to work with in terms of reinvention and rebirth. That series could follow her attempts to build unexpected connections with people and worlds completely unfamiliar to her, while also dealing with the daily realities of maintaining a house without staff or the many amenities she’s used to. All of this could unfold amid some of the most spectacular landscapes in the United States.

The problem with Sheridan’s series is that it is that show—and at the same time, it isn’t. As in many of his other projects, Sheridan prefers to present blunt, simplistic oppositions when a bit more ambiguity and complexity would help. The creator of Landman surrounds Stacy with a crew of incompetents: two daughters, two granddaughters, and a son-in-law who all seem to have wandered in from a bad 1990s sitcom. Like good big-city millionaires, they understand nothing about their new surroundings, have no idea what to do, fail to solve a single problem, get scared by everything, and spend most of their time annoying each other. Their peculiar brand of political correctness only makes matters worse, landing them in trouble more than once in ways that feel more like parody than commentary.

Sheridan also has a habit of portraying many young women as variations on the “dumb blonde” stereotype (see Billy Bob Thornton’s daughter in Landman), and here he has quite a large group to humiliate, along with a husband who’s useless at almost everything. The show makes that parody even clearer by contrasting them with the locals: warm, intelligent, resourceful people who know how to solve problems, help others, and fix in seconds the situations that leave the Clyburns screaming in panic.

It’s true that around the third episode the exaggerated contrast begins to soften a bit. But even that shift happens in the most predictable way possible: with the arrival of a “handsome guy”—a police officer and widower, played by Ben Schnetzer—who sweeps Abby off her feet and makes her consider that maybe eating elk isn’t the end of the world, and that if it means keeping him close, she can probably survive hearing Native Americans referred to as “Indians.” There are worse things, after all—especially if everyone in Montana turns out to be charming and the scenery, filmed with sensitivity (if occasionally bordering on postcard imagery) by director Christina Alexandra Voros, is almost unbelievably beautiful.

When The Madison drops the slapstick family comedy—the wasp mishaps, the terror of bears—it gets better. Especially when it focuses on Stacy’s evolution and on the way Pfeiffer navigates the wide emotional range her character experiences. Russell and Fox take up less screen time in the narrative—you’ll see why—but the scenes shared by the two veteran actors, who hadn’t worked together since the excellent 1989 crime film Tequila Sunrise, are enough to lift a show that otherwise keeps shooting itself in the foot. That version of The Madison is the one worth sticking around for. The other one, not so much.