The Abandons puts Lena Headey and Gillian Anderson on horseback in big hats in a Western drama about family, love, greed, hate, murder, and revenge.

The Abandons is the name of the ranch owned by matriarch Fiona (Lena Headey) and her family of abandoned orphans who grew up with her and were loyal to her. Fiona’s family included Elias (Nick Robinson), Dahlia (Diana Silvers), Albert (Lamar Johnson), and Lilla (Natalia del Riego).

Constance Van Ness (Gillian Anderson) headed the family including Willem (Toby Hemingway), Garret (Lucas Till), and Trisha (Aisling Franciosi).

The Van Ness family was wealthy and powerful. They owned silver mines and needed to expand their holdings to keep the silver flowing. Some of their employees were important enforcers for them: Jack Cree (Michael Greyeyes) and Xavier Roache (Michiel Huisman) in particular.

Fiona and Constance are very much alike. Both will do anything to protect the family. Both will bend the rules and break the law when it suits them. Both will lie with a straight face. Both demand obedience and loyalty from their children. They go head to head in every episode. Each mother thinks her kind of love is better and more important than any other.

Fiona’s family is one of four families in a hollow who are holding out against the Van Ness interest in their land and the silver under it. Constance used dirty tricks like poisoning land and running cattle off a cliff to get them to sell, but they held fast. Finally, Constance came up with a compromise that might work.

There is so much rivalry and animosity in this series. People make decisions based on greed, anger, and hatred. There are no heroes in this story.

The first couple of episodes used stilted language and awkwardly constructed sentences. This was apparently supposed to indicate an accent from somewhere else. It was abandoned (hehe) quickly for normal American 21st Century language. All the main characters were seemingly important, but not all were developed. Lilla had almost no lines. Elias and Trisha Van Ness had a Romeo and Juliette romance. Things that felt like character development in one episode ended up being a reason for murder a couple of episodes later.

It was 1854. Death was an everyday fact of life. But plenty of people got murdered in this series. There were many subplots involving both families and all the folks in the hollow who were resisting the mines. There were even some subplots with the Native Americans and the Cavalry. They threw all the tropes used in Westerns in here, but made it feel different because two women were the leads in the story.

The ending was inconclusive, which makes me think they are hoping for a second season. I would watch anything with Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey, but this is nowhere near as good as I hoped it would be when I saw the names of the stars. The drama kept me watching and I would come back for more Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey, but the series is disappointing overall.

There were 7 episodes in the series, two of them directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton. All the episodes are available on Netflix now.

If you watch it, I’d love to know what you thought of it.