SERIES PREMIERE: It’s been only a decade since AMC redefined itself by presenting quality original drama programming, with 2007’s
Mad Men and, before that, with the 2006 AMC Western miniseries
Broken Trail, starring Robert Duvall. Both Westerns and miniseries were dying genres then, and Westerns still are today – but maybe this new series, based on the novel by Philipp Meyer, will help change that. It’s about tough Texan Eli McCullough, shown alternatively at two pivotal points in his life. One is in 1849, when he’s a teen in Central Texas, his family victimized by a band of Comanches. The other is in 1915, when he’s a grandfatherly ranch owner and patriarch in South Texas, played by Pierce Brosnan in his first TV series role since
Remington Steele back in the 1980s. Brosnan’s Eli is part Pa Cartwright, part J.R. Ewing: two grown sons live and work with him on his ranch, and with Model T cars the new transportation mode of choice, he sees the future as oil, not cattle.
The Son presents its wild West as a war against Mexican interlopers on the Western border, with much of the conflict coming from the different McCullough generations. “Who’s running this ranch, Daddy, you or me?” demands one of the sons. Bronson, with a slippery but world-weary drawl, replies, “Allegedly, you are.”
The Son is, at times, a violent Western, and at other times, as with
Bonanza, a Western that manages to comment on today’s issues. But it is, above all, a Western, and is welcome on that basis alone. Tonight’s two-hour premiere is simulcast on Sundance.
For a full review, see David Hinckley’s All Along the Watchtower.