The Ending of Netflix's 'Ransom County' Is a Trash Fire of Epic Proportions

I haven’t been this frustrated with the end of a season of television since the ending of the first season of Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman’s The Killing, which at least had the decency to be good up until its faceplant. But let’s just get this out of the way first: Ransom County is not Netflix’s answer to Yellowstone. I have very mixed feelings about Taylor Sheridan, but that’s still an insult to the Yellowstone creator. It’s not Dollar-Store Friday Night Lights, either. I mean, it is set in Texas, but aside from some horses and cowboy hats, it makes no real attempt to feel like Texas.

Honestly, it’s more like Gossip Girl set in a ranch town. Not like the OG Gossip Girl with Blake Lively; like the shitty Max reboot. But even that gives too much credit to the writing on Ransom County, which is like substandard The Young and the Restless. It’s a poorly written, badly acted trash fire that can’t even live up to star Eoin Macken’s previous series, La Brea, about a sinkhole that lands its characters in 10,000 BC. At least that one had wooly mammoths.

It’s a preposterous series, but maybe its worst sin is that it’s watchable. I hated that so much about Ransom County, because I knew how awful it was, but I also couldn’t look away. It’s not a train wreck, exactly, because train wrecks at least have the decency to be tragic. It’s more like a fender bender with a Cybertruck that causes all its panels to fall off. It’s entertaining for how embarrassing it is.

At its heart, Ransom County is a soapy love story, and a bad one at that. The problem is, it sets up all these storylines, drags us through 10 episodes by dangling the carrot of a satisfying resolution, only to yank the carrot away and stomp on it in the last 20 minutes because the writers apparently don’t have enough confidence to come up with new storylines for a second season. So they sabotage their happy endings in the hopes they can drag viewers along for another 10 episodes of the same bullshit.

There are several storylines here, but for brevity’s sake, here they are in a nutshell:

— There’s a love triangle between Staten Kirkland (Josh Duhamel), his late wife’s best friend, Quinn O’Grady (Minka Kelly), and his late wife’s brother, Davis Collins (Eoin Macken). Quinn ping-pongs between Davis, who showers her with affection, and Staten, the troubled, sullen widower who is the obvious love of her life, for ten agonizing episodes, only to decide in the end to return to New York City and pursue her music career (she’s a classical pianist).

— The Yellowstone nod is a power company that wants to run a pipeline through Ransom County. Over the course of the season, Davis tries to convince Staten — his nemesis — and Cap (James Brolin), an old, stubborn rancher, to sell their land so Davis can make a fortune and save his own ranch at the expense of theirs. This storyline ends exactly where it begins: with no resolution and Staten and Davis still at loggerheads (but only after the two almost decide to work together to save both their ranches).

— In addition to losing his wife, Staten also lost his teenage son in a car accident. There’s a season-long mystery about who exactly was responsible, and at least this one does find some resolution: after teasing several possibilities, we finally learn it was the sheriff’s wife, who was drunk and having an affair with the town outcast. She drove the son off the road to his death but initially let the town outcast take the fall for it.

— There’s another love triangle, this one among high schoolers. Both the town outcast’s brother, Lucas (Garrett Wareing), and Davis’s son, Reid (Andrew Liner), are in love with the sheriff’s daughter, Lauren (Lizzy Green), although she clearly prefers Lucas, whom her father tries to forbid her from seeing. This storyline crashes and burns so many times that by the time Lauren takes Lucas back for the 17th time, no one even cares anymore because they’ll probably break up again in the premiere of a potential second season.

— There’s also a simmering bad boy, Yancy Grey (Jack Schumacher), who saunters into town intending to scam Cap out of his land on behalf of the power company. But he falls in love with a local bartender, Ellie (Marianly Tejada), and it turns out that Cap is his estranged grandfather. Yancy has a change of heart and decides he wants to be an upstanding man for Ellie. But then Cap dies — because James Brolin was like, “I’m taking my check and getting the hell out of here” — and right before Yancy and Ellie are due to marry, Yancy’s wife (or ex-wife) stumbles into town.

That about covers the major storylines. But the whole thing feels like a bad romcom where the couple that hate each other fall madly in love, only here there are half a dozen complications keeping everyone from their happy endings. And just when the finale feels like it’s coasting toward that merry resolution, it has to work overtime to shoehorn in more complications to keep everything dangling.

But the thing is: Ransom County is not nearly good enough to deserve cliffhangers. It deserves a kick in the teeth for putting us through the wringer only to leave us there. Because the only thing this wretched series had going for it was the promise of a satisfying resolution, and it strings us along merrily toward it only to punch us in the nose. There’s nothing here except, should the series be renewed, the promise of ten more episodes of contrived obstacles and frustration over thinly drawn characters who don’t even deserve our frustration. It’s Garbage Town, Jake, and I hope the power company runs its pipeline through it and turns the whole place into a strip mall.