The Outer Range: Out of my Range of Caring

We live in a post-truth world.  Even the certainties of life are under assault—most billionaires laugh at the concept of taxes, and plenty still believe Tupac is alive.  But I hold that one truth remains strong: if you’re characters suck, so too does your story.  This is what plagues the otherwise interesting Amazon Prime show The Outer Range, a modern Western with a healthy dash of sci-fi.  Spoilers ahead, partner.

The show has two primary conflcits that a plethora of subplots leach onto.  First, the “good ol’ traditional ranching” Abbotts family is fighting a hostile takeover from the neighboring “corporate ranching sell-out” Tillerson family.  Second, those good old Abbotts are hiding how one of their boys murdered one of the Tillerson sons.  Both provide plenty of conflict, and both allow for multiple tie-ins to the sci-fi element of the show.

The characters let this story down.  I just don’t like any of them.  In the first episode, they do an excellent job making the Tillerson’s out to be jerks.  Sweet, I thought, here are our villains!  But then they have the Abbotts literally murder someone, and now the water gets muddy.  Sure, there are positives to having your protagonists taking a darker path, but you have to balance that out in some way to ensure your audience empathizes with them still.

Take Walter White in Breaking Bad.  The audience could empathize with his objectively heinous decision to start making meth because they saw the terrible circumstance he was in with an inability to afford medical care—something many Americans have legitimate concerns with.  Granted, yes, his frienemy offered to pay for his care, but Walter refusing it was a) foreshadowing how his pride would ruin everything, and b) necessary for the story to go anywhere.  The situation gave enough of a reason for the audience to root for him as he took action to fix his problem, even if those methods were terrible.

Contrast that with the Abbotts.  The family patriarch, Royal, is a royal pain.  He demonstrates little to no redeemable features, shutting out his wife and acting in a domineering way over his entire family as he tries to lie, threaten, and connive his way out of the Tillerson situations.  The eventual reveal as to why he’s hesitant to share the Void with anyone else is too little, too late—by the last episode in the season, the audience’s opinion of him is set. 

His sons aren’t any better, both two-dimensional vessels of “woe is me” that get roughly no agency of their own as they take orders from their father.  Round it off with the wife who goes along with covering up the murder even as she professes to be a God-fearing Christian and a granddaughter who exists solely to find a dead body and become another character in a few years, and you have an unlikeable family in a bad situation.  Not fertile ground for great storytelling, that.

When the audience has no one to root for, it doesn’t matter how interesting the plot is.  If the audience doesn’t care about a story’s characters, the whole thing turns gray and lifeless.  On the other hand, great characters can turn a staid and prosaic plot into a tremendous story that resonates with millions.  If I say Harry, Ron, and Hermione, 99% of you will know immediately who I’m talking about.  But if I tried to explain their story without any of the usual Harry Potter markers, there’s a decent chance you’d get it confused with the myriad of other good versus evil fantasy stories in the world.  “Good magician and co. stop bad magician from conquering the world” is a trope, but great characters turn it into Harry Potter.

I wish Outer Range had been as bold with its characters as it was with many of its other choices, because the sci-fi elements kept me coming back for most of the season.  By the end, though, I realized something we all do eventually with old high school acquaintances—if I don’t like these people, why am I wasting my time hanging out with them?