Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 16, 2026
For anyone who doesn’t care for the works of Taylor Sheridan, The Madison is not likely to change their mind — notwithstanding a terrific performance from Michelle Pfeiffer. But for anyone who enjoys the way Sheridan upbraids city folk — like the animal rights activist in Yellowstone played by Piper Perabo, or the corporate lawyer in Landman played by Kayla Wallace — The Madison was engineered with you specifically in mind.
As an Arkansan with a higher education who now lives in a city, I find The Madison equal parts unctuous and occasionally, yes, somewhat satisfying. There is something to be said for the beauty and serenity of nature — but Taylor Sheridan doesn’t always have to be so smug about it. The man is dead set on putting coastal elites in their place, which accounts for much of his popularity in the so-called flyover states.
Pfeiffer plays Stacy Clyburn, a certified “city mouse,” who lives in New York with her two dysfunctional daughters, Abigail (Beau Garrett) and Paige (Elle Chapman), Paige’s investment banker husband Russell (Patrick J. Adams), and Abigail’s two children, Bridget (Amiah Miller) and Macy (Alaina Pollack). The series opens with Paige walking down Fifth Avenue, getting punched by a mugger, and then refusing to tell the responding police officer that her assailant was Black because she doesn’t want to seem racist. That’s what Taylor Sheridan thinks of Manhattan and its people — and he wants to make sure you know it within the first five minutes.
Meanwhile, Stacy’s husband Preston (Kurt Russell) is out fly-fishing at his Montana cabin with his brother Paul (Matthew Fox). Stacy and Preston have, by all appearances, a perfect marriage — with one notable exception: she has never once set foot on Preston’s Montana land. That changes when Preston and Paul die in a plane crash returning from their fishing trip.
Stacy brings her family out to Montana to identify her husband’s body, and while they’re there, all of them get a crash course in rural living. It’s a fish-out-of-water drama about a woman grieving the sudden loss of her husband while also discovering the other life Preston had built — a life he tried desperately to share with his family, who never engaged with it because, well, city folk.
The spoiled daughters don’t exactly take to country living. Hornets sting Paige in an unfortunate location when she uses the outhouse; the family is scandalized when a local cowboy uses “Indians” instead of “Native Americans” (though he’s married to a Native woman, so he can’t possibly be racist — right?); and everyone recoils when they realize the steak on their plates is elk. It’s that kind of show: Sheridan moralizing about how much richer and realer it is to live in rural Montana than in New York City, where Black men randomly punch white women on the street.
It’s obnoxious as hell — albeit occasionally amusing — but the real power of The Madison lies in the grief that Stacy, and eventually the rest of the family, experiences over the loss of a husband and father who was, by the show’s accounting, damn near perfect (barring some cheerfully unreconstructed sexism). There’s a certain The Notebook quality to it that lends The Madison genuine emotional heft in the stretches where Sheridan isn’t busy demeaning his female characters — or Russell, the investment banker who is constitutionally helpless without WiFi and a restaurant with a wine list.
But as Sheridan is so fond of doing, he ultimately redeems his lost souls by showing how transformative a little time in the sticks can be. Abigail meets a strapping sheriff’s deputy (Ben Schnetzer) who is, essentially, whatever Sheridan’s bumpkin equivalent of a manic-pixie-dream-guy looks like — which is, at this point, a full-on Sheridan trope. Country folk may not understand “pronouns,” but they’re all simple and kind, or so Sheridan believes.
As genuinely annoying as The Madison can be, Sheridan has a real knack for crafting soap operas aimed squarely at men — the whole series is catnip for “girl dads.” It is, at its core, a show about how these women worshipped their late father, how life without him feels impossible, and how they find their way back to him through his land and, inevitably, a screening of A River Runs Through It. It’s patronizing as hell, but Sheridan knows exactly who he’s making this for. And they’re going to eat it up — hell, even I got a little misty, while fully acknowledging that it’s patronizing nonsense. It’s pure male fantasy: the secret wish that your family would fall apart without you, only to find their way back through the journal you left behind.
It’s sentimental claptrap — the masculine answer to the bodice ripper. But those bodice rippers have an audience, too, and Sheridan’s counting on it.
