Enter The Abandons, a gloriously bloody, female-led power grab that looks like the first Western in years with the actual range to challenge Sheridan’s dominance. Starring Gillian Anderson as an ice-veined mining magnate and Lena Headey as a hardened frontier woman leading a found family of outcasts with a high tolerance for violence, the series has everything: land feuds, buried trauma, forbidden romance, and enough lawless ambition to make Kevin Costner’s ten-gallon cowboy hat spin. If you’ve been craving a Western that isn’t afraid to blow up the American bootstraps mythmaking – or at least put women in charge of the explosives – then pull up a saddle, this one’s for you.
Why ‘The Abandons’ Isn’t Your Dad’s Western
Beyond the gunfights and silver rush chaos, the show is chewing on some big, messy questions baked into the Americana myth: Who gets to claim power? Who writes the rules? And who gets trampled when those rules inevitably change? The Abandons isn’t interested in cowboy codes of honor; it’s far more invested in the idea that chosen family can be just as brutal and just as binding as blood. Here, grit doesn’t guarantee survival, morality is a luxury no one can afford, and the West is both a place of opportunity and a pressure cooker for ambition and violence.
At the center of all this carnage are two women who could outmaneuver a dozen Duttons without breaking a sweat in the saddle. Anderson’s Constance Van Ness is a widowed land baron: calculating, dynastic, and styled like a 19th-century CEO who settles hostile takeovers with a Colt 45. Opposite her is Headey’s Fiona Nolan, a frontier survivor corralling a ragtag clan of orphans into something resembling a family – or, more accurately, a well-armed militia – guided by a moral compass that’s cracked but still somewhat functional. Surrounding them is a stacked ensemble of shit-stirring strivers (Nick Robinson, Diana Silvers, Michiel Huisman, Lucas Till, Patton Oswalt) who fill out both sides of this blood feud, playing sons, daughters, and henchmen ready to let lead fly. Together, this all signals Netflix isn’t just dabbling in the Western again, it wants a flagship, and The Abandons just might fit in those spurs.
How ‘The Abandons’ Lets Women Run the Frontier… and Wreck It
What makes The Abandons a genuine threat to Sheridan’s throne is that it isn’t trying to be Yellowstone with ladies. Its leads operate more like frontier crime bosses, completely unbothered by the moral implications of a little gunfire during a time period when might was the real law of the land. That alone destabilizes a genre that’s spent the last decade orbiting the same archetype: grizzled white men with a ranch, a grudge, and enough repressed emotional damage to fill a cattle trough. Here, the women aren’t counterpoints or caretakers; they’re the architects of the violence, maternal and murderous.
The show also sharpens the political edges that Sheridan tends to smooth over. The Abandons looks directly at the machinery of that Old West mythos: the land theft, the violent expansionism, and asks who actually benefits from the mess of America’s origin story. There aren’t any true heroes. Everything is rawer, meaner, and more historically honest, which makes it feel unexpectedly refreshing for a genre set in the 1800s.
