In the premiere of Netflix’s Untamed, Eric Bana‘s Kyle Turner arrives at a pivotal crime scene on horseback, visage grizzled and posture rigid against the backdrop of British Columbia impersonating Yosemite National Park.
With a combination of snark and reverence, one of the park rangers refers to Turner as “Gary Fucking Cooper,” leaving little doubt of creators Mark L. Smith and Elle Smith’s aspirations.
Untamed
The Bottom Line
Like a slightly undercooked ‘True Detective,’ for better or worse.
Airdate: Thursday, July 17 (Netfix)
Cast: Eric Bana, Lily Santiago, Sam Neill, Wilson Bethel, Rosemarie DeWitt
Creators: Mark L. Smith & Elle Smith
Despite being filmed primarily in Canada and boasting an Australian as its taciturn leading man (and a Kiwi as his kindly mentor), Untamed wants to be a throwback slice of Western-infused Americana, self-consciously going after the audience that has made Yellowstone and its various offshoots into one of TV’s most successful franchises.
Although Netflix is billing it as a limited series, Untamed is far from inherently close-ended. It’s the sort of tightly — often too tightly — constructed six-episode potboiler with epic frontier undertones that should find a receptive audience among fans of mysteries like Slow Horses, Reacher and Dept. Q (as well as viewers who like the general structure of True Detective, but would prefer a little less philosophical noodling).
Untamed has a gripping opening. A couple of nameless climbers are ascending El Capitan when a woman’s corpse falls from the summit, nearly sending all three plummeting to the ground and definitely prompting vertigo in sensitive viewers, even if it’s clearly done primarily with CG or compositing (like a lot of elements here).
The case belongs to Turner. He’s an Investigative Services Branch special agent, working the park for decades after a presumably brief career at the FBI. He isn’t sure, but he thinks he recognizes the dead woman, who has an assortment of confusing markings, including a gold “X” tattoo and wounds seemingly from an animal attack. Several elements of the opening don’t fully make sense once the story resolves itself, but you’ll probably have forgotten those elements by the end — and the show is fine with you forgetting a few things.
Turner has the observational skills of a quintessential Prestige TV genius investigator and he shares a semi-recent personal trauma with roughly half the leads on those Prestige TV dramas. Because of his genius, he doesn’t suffer fools, which causes initial prickliness with Naya (Lily Santiago), a single mom park ranger and recent transplant from Los Angeles, who gets reluctantly assigned to provide assistance.
Because of his semi-recent personal trauma, and a drinking problem whose severity the show cannot determine, Turner is a constant source of concern for longtime father figure Paul Souter (Sam Neill), who might be the park’s head ranger, and ex-wife Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt), an occasional realtor remarried to Scott (Josh Randall), a guy so blandly decent you forget he exists when he isn’t standing next to Jill.
In extremely convenient fashion, the case involving the dead woman is tied to a missing person case from Turner’s past, not to be confused with a different missing person from Turner’s past that’s also bubbling to the surface. It all leads to a resolution that’s way too tidy and points to the series having way too few characters for anything complex to unfold, suspect-wise.
Initially, Untamed feints in the direction of complexity. When Turner gets to that first crime scene, there’s some expositional banter about jurisdiction. I was fully on-board to learn the hierarchy between rangers, local authorities, the park superintendent and whatever the ISB is — ready to learn the specific complications of solving a murder within a national park.
And there are early hints that Untamed might be prepared to engage with the staffing nightmares produced by a National Park Service that has lost roughly a quarter of its full-time staff as part of cuts under the current administration. I wondered: Would Untamed be the first series to evoke the black cloud of DOGE layoffs? Would Untamed choose to celebrate the fundamental necessity of protecting our national parks or would it dismiss them as so much fat to be trimmed from our bloated federal budget? Pretty much “Nah,” all around.
I’m a sucker for a conventional mystery set in an unconventional location, and there are occasional moments when Untamed gets value out of being nominally set in Yosemite — whether it’s replacing a genre-standard dive bar with a tourist lodge or the idea of a natural preserve so vast and generally under-explored that squatters can live off-the-radar and people can simply go missing with alarming frequency.
In the balance, though, the jurisdictional stuff ceases to be notable, the geographical scope is weirdly limited and it becomes unnerving how many scenes, however generally pretty, have the same one or two familiar Yosemite postcard locations. Instead of living and breathing the setting, Untamed does less with that pivotal aspect of its plot than Spectrum and Paramount+’s otherwise unremarkable Joe Pickett, about a Wyoming game warden dealing with crime and corruption on the edge of Yellowstone (as played by Alberta).
It’s a show that begins with topical potential that goes unrealized and, instead, settles for spinning a solid yarn, albeit one propped up by entirely too many clichés. From Turner’s tragic backstory — treated as a surprise, hence my being pointlessly coy — to everything related to Wilson Bethel as a former sniper turned animal control agent to the latest iteration of the ol’ “Using a deceased person’s face to break into their phone” gag, Untamed generally chooses shortcuts over substance.
Still, the show moves fast — shortcuts will do that — and, in Bana and Santiago, it has exactly the sort of mismatched partnership at its center that genre shows of this sort strive for. Bana is gruffly effective, conveying square-jawed authority and salt-and-pepper maturity without pushing Turner too far into the kind of emotional torment that could make Untamed into a character study rather than a whodunit. Santiago counters with a wide-eyed sweetness and believable sarcasm, providing Untamed with a burst of humor that you might not anticipate based on Mark L. Smith’s writing credits on The Revenant and, most recently, Netflix’s brutal American Primeval.
Both Neill and DeWitt have underwritten characters, but they provide doses of warmth whenever they appear, sometimes shoehorned into the story like Jill getting brought in to babysit Naya’s kid for no discernible reason. Hints of a worthy but insufficiently utilized ensemble come from the likes of Raoul Max Trujillo, JD Pardo and Alexandra Castillo.
By the finale, mostly thanks to Bana and Santiago, but in part because of the novelty of the setting, I was generally engaged with Untamed and even had a thought that rarely pops into my head these days: This could stand to be an episode or two longer. So perhaps Netflix can reconsider that “limited” thing.
#Eric #Bana #Uneven #Promising #Netflix #Mystery
