Prime Video’s Outer Range Is Mystery and Religious Ecstasy on the High Plains

When I was in fourth grade, we spent a solid week learning how to read brands.

It was probably a Social Studies unit; I’m pretty sure fourth grade was the year designated by the county as being the one for Wyoming state history. And brands—as will quickly become clear to anyone who queues up the first two episodes of Prime Video’s new speculative high plains thriller, Outer Range—are a big part of that history. The Lazy M Bar. The Rocking J. The N Bar N. The Double Four. We learned them all. (By sight, at least, if not yet as visceral manifestations of frontier settler colonialism.) Was this a skill set I’d go on to need in the leafy suburbs of the second most populous city in the state? I mean, not really. But I guess it didn’t hurt to know that, should the hyper-aggressive, ATV-obsessed owners of the ranch neighboring the stretch of acreage where we boarded our horses ever made good on their threats to shoot any dog that set so much as a paw across the property line, I’d at least be able to name their brand in a line-up.

If it seems like I’m taking my time getting to the point, well, the wait will make good practice for Outer Range. Created and executive produced by Ben Watkins and starring Josh Brolin, Imogen Poots, Lili Taylor, Tamara Podemski, Lewis Pullman, Tom Pelphrey, Noah Reid, Shaun Sipos, Will Patton, and The Haunting of Hill House’s Olive Abercrombie, Prime Video’s eerie, Wyoming-set speculative mystery series is so damn unhurried it’s easy, half the time, to forget you’re watching a mystery at all. Hell, it’s easy, half the time, to forget you’re watching anything. Just stretched-wide vistas, a vast, open sky, and a giant, supernatural hole whose secrets no one—or at least, no one with any meaningful narrative power—has the slightest interest in plumbing.

In short: If an entire landscape could be laconic, that’s how I’d describe the fictional Amelia County of Watkins’ Outer Range.

This isn’t a failing. An economy of dialogue and a protraction of plot serve Outer Range well, as the mystery of the big spooky hole in the Abbotts’ west pasture isn’t the point of the series so much as its psychological fulcrum. That is to say, what the hole is is far less important than what it represents—to Royal (Brolin), who seems to see it as proof God has abandoned humanity to a great void; to Autumn (Poots), who seems to see it as a portal to a world whose bones she might better fit; to Wayne Tillerson (Patton), who seems to see it as the next frontier that’s rightfully his to conquer; to whoever else might stumble across it, they might see in it their darkest inner truth. It’s the ultimate blank space against which any broken person can project their deepest fears; the ultimate well into which they can cast their most shameful secrets. It is both a precursor to and object of a kind of frontier-born religious ecstasy, a divine madness, a theia mania that overtakes every major player by season’s end. It might, too, be a doorway to a different plain. Although if it were, Royal et al would be the last ones to tell literally any other soul.

The point is: In the unsettled and unsettling world of Wambang, Wyoming, the big spooky hole in the Abbotts’ west pasture doesn’t have to mean anything to upend reality. It deranges the Abbott and Tillerson families plenty just by existing, a feeling that director Alonso Ruizpalacios and cinematographer Jay Keitel do a particularly good job stirring up for the audience on a visceral level in the first episode (“The Void”) with an array of hard cuts that yank the viewer from scene to scene before any of them really start or end, lots of atypical/odd closeups that cut off more of whichever character in the frame than is formally useful, and a dogged unwillingness to give the viewer nearly enough time with the hole to get any real sense of its (un)reality.

Smart visual storytelling aside, I realize that I still haven’t gotten to the point of this review—at least, not fully. Because if the mystery of the big spooky hole isn’t the narrative engine behind Outer Range’s first season—and it really isn’t—then I should probably say in plain language what is, and whether or not Outer Range has the tools to make that story engaging enough to watch in doubleheader drops for the next several weeks.

So here, in the broadest possible terms, is the story Outer Range is telling: On a vast stretch of (fictional) Amelia County land just north of the (real) Wind River Range, two legacy ranches sit on either side of a disputed fenceline. On Royal Abbott’s side is a working ranch, with maybe eighty head of cattle that Royal and his wife (Taylor), two sons (Pullman and Pelphrey) and nine-year-old granddaughter (Abercrombie) move from pasture to pasture as needed. On Wayne Tillersons’ side, by contrast, there is voracious speculation, avaricious mineral extraction, and a trio of entitled, ATV-revving assholes (Sipos, Reid, and Matt Lauria) whose sense of brotherhood seems rooted more in the mad power their family holds over everyone else in the county than in the blood they share. In Royal’s west pasture, we learn early in the first episode, there is a hole. Perfectly round, perfectly flat, but not perfectly empty: It is filled (as you might only be able to discern if you watch in the dark with all the lights turned off) with a swirling, blue-gray plasma, something like smoke but a lot more solid. On the Abbotts’ side, only Royal seems to know about the hole. On the Tillersons’ side, well, if Wayne doesn’t know about the hole, then he knows there’s something valuable enough in Royal’s west pasture to spend months terrorizing the family in ways both psychological and legalistic to get it.