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The Abandons review – Gillian Anderson’s po-faced western has some very dodgy script moments

Icy mining magnate Gillian Anderson goes head to head with rebellious rancher Lena Headey in a drama that takes itself so very, very seriously

Angel’s Ridge, Washington Territory, 1854. It’s dusty, there’s a saloon bar, there are horses, an ineffable sense of – I don’t know, let’s call it manifest destiny – about the place, and the only colour settlers have brought with them is sepia. But wait! What’s this? The owner of the local silver mine riding into town? And it’s a woman! In a western?

Yessir, it is. Not only that but she is played by Gillian Anderson (in full ice mode, despite the dust) and is clearly trouble. Not only that, but there is a second woman about to go toe-to-toe with her and do battle for the town’s soul over the eight episodes that comprise The Abandons, the latest venture from Sons of Anarchy’s Kurt Sutter. Its joint lead is Lena Headey as Fiona Nolan, a devout Irish Catholic woman who has gathered a misfit ragtag bunch of motley orphan crew outcasts about her and lives with this patchwork family in Jasper Hollow. Jasper Hollow, alas, is full of silver that Constance Van Ness (the local mine owner, played by Anderson) wishes to bring under her control to placate one of her investors.

‘The Abandons’ Review: Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey Lead Kurt Sutter’s Disappointingly Slight Netflix Western

Two matriarchs butt heads over the fate of their Washington Territory frontier town in this seven-part drama co-starring Nick Robinson and Aisling Franciosi.

For better and worse, Kurt Sutter is a television creator whom I associate with excess.

From his work writing on The Shield, through Sons of Anarchy and The Bastard Executioner, Sutter dramas have reliably, if not always pleasurably, delivered high dramatic stakes, wild emotional extremes and — once FX removed all pre-existing guardrails and said “Sure, do whatever you want, Kurt” — thoroughly unrestrained running times.

For better and worse, Kurt Sutter is not a television creator whom I associate with insufficiencies. I’ve never watched a Kurt Sutter show and thought, “Man, the language is insufficiently expressive, the violence insufficiently shocking, the characters insufficiently tormented, the themes insufficiently articulated, the episodes insufficiently long.”

'The Abandons' Is Everything Wrong With TV in 2025

The Abandons is a Rorschach test. What you see in the new Netflix western says at least as much about your perspective on the current TV landscape as it does about the show itself. Look at it one way, and it’s an innocuous potboiler—no masterpiece, sure, but entertaining enough to please fans of the genre. The girl-power themes; the casting of two beloved franchise leads, Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey, opposite one another; and the fact that it was created by Sons of Anarchy’s Kurt Sutter are guaranteed to delight various key segments of the platform’s meticulously quantified subscriber base. But for anyone who sifts through huge quantities of television, The Abandons embodies everything that’s frustrating about the medium right now. 

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