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Prime Video's 'Outer Range' Is a Goddamn Television Masterpiece

By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 25, 2022 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 25, 2022 |


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Last week when I thought that Prime Video’s Outer Range was something akin to Lost crossed with Yellowstone crossed with La Brea. I figured they could not tailor a show more specifically to me. I was wrong. This week, it’s as though they reached inside my brain and specifically grabbed for the one element that would make me even more excited about this series. Now, it has some of that weird, off-kilter energy similar to the divine works of Chris Conrad (Patriot, Perpetual Grace, LTD, Ultra City Smiths). It is bonkers.

Yes, there is a time hole that appears to be a portal to both the past and future (and by past, I mean the Pleistocene era with, like, mastodons). There is also an attempt to cover up a murder that is foiled when the dead cowboy that is thrown into the black hole falls back out into the present eight days later, but the body has only been decomposing for 10 hours (the time of death is really going to confuse the sheriff’s murder investigation). There’s also a shirtless Will Patton braying at a taxidermied buffalo while grieving the death of his son (the aforementioned dead cowboy). Oh, and don’t forget the poet who doesn’t remember anything prior to the age of nine, who I am convinced is from a past era but who emerged from the black hole when she was nine, because that is an exact storyline from La Brea! But this is so much better because it’s actually good, but not in a fun, stupid way; in a way that suggests that Kevin Costner got caught in a Coen Brothers’/Land of the Lost blender and got splattered against the wall during a bloody, phlegmatic coughing bout from tuberculosis.

Outer Range comes from first-time creator/writer Brian Watkins, who may or may not be the end product of a slap fight between Taylor Sheridan and Damon Lindelof. It’s like, what would happen if a stoic, skeptical, down-to-business, no-nonsense cowboy looked up in the Wyoming sky and saw an actual mountain disappear? How would the most straight-laced, grunty rancher react to bizarre unexplainable phenomena? I love it, and somehow, they managed to improve upon it this week by introducing a cowboy who sings random songs from the ’70s and ’80s, like Fleetwood Mac or Juice Newton, or hell, Peter Gabriel while eulogizing his dead brother.

Outer Range airs twice weekly on Prime Video. Get in on this. I cannot wait to see what kind of crazy comes out of the next episode.