The original post: /r/television by /u/Skeet_fighter on 2025-04-27 23:56:01.
I watched the first episode and was unbelievably bored. I have a lot of patience for movies or shows that are slow and build gradually, but that first episode felt like it was on for 3 hours and only one thing lasting 5 minutes actually happened (the “stealing back” of the cattle).
I understand establishing your characters is important and that’s partly what the show was trying to do, but the characterisation of pretty much every character was either really weak to the point it was barely there or a messy mound of cliches.
Beth Dutton for example. There doesn’t seem to be any rationale behind how she behaves towards other people. It seems like somebody in the writers room had “Is a boss bitch!” on a sticky note and that’s as far as that went. So she’s just kind of an arsehole to everybody for little to no reason, except when she’s not once or twice, apparently.
And then you have the lawyer Dutton brother who is in quite a lot of scenes. Relatively, I think he might have one of the highest proportions of screentime in the episode, and what’s his personality like? I have no fucking idea. As far as I can tell he basically doesn’t have one? Unless you count caring what his Dad thinks as a personality, which I don’t.
From what I saw though there just wasn’t anything at all that had me actually wanting to watch more. A plot around a river dispute and who owns a heard of cows isn’t exactly gripping dramatic viewing to me.
But maybe I’m just one of them no good city boys who hates nature and small town living and not a super cool awesome yeehaw cowboy who is obviously always “right”.
I guess there were lots of nice shots of country vistas. That’s probably the best thing about it. Very pretty valley and mountain range.
But I’m not going to be watching more, the show seems like a mostly badly written slog if that first episode is anything to go by.
Anybody that’s watched it: Is this the case? Does it get better? Does it somehow get worse?