“We were all waiting.” That’s how Josh Brolin describes the six-month gap between when his first TV series in 20 years, Outer Range, premiered on Prime Video in April 2022, and when the streamer finally announced the commissioning of a second season that October. “There was a big fan base, but it wasn’t a runaway hit,” says Brolin, both a star and executive producer on the project. “I was like, ‘Look, I feel that this is worth it. I can go do a movie—I don’t have to do this—but there’s something in this that’s golden. Let’s keep exploring it.” After receiving the official green light, Brolin jumped at the chance to “refine our idea” for the high-concept series, an effort which pays rich rewards in Outer Range’s second season, all seven episodes of which will premiere on May 16. It required a makeover behind the scenes.
Season two features a new showrunner and EP in Charles Murray, a TV veteran known for writing on Luke Cage, Sons of Anarchy, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars; he replaces creator Brian Watkins, a playwright who made his screenwriting and producing debut with Outer Range. (He’s no longer credited as an EP on the series.) In his first extended interview about the second season, Brolin tells me that the change felt important to Outer Range’s future success. “With Brian, I think that he was given a responsibility that was irresponsible given his experience. He had never been on a set before,” he says. “It makes perfect sense to me why we were meandering at times.” Brolin felt frustrated with the lack of answers provided in the twisty mystery’s first season: “We had some people involved that were like, ‘You need to just trust’…and I was like, Yeah, bullshit. We need to know, we’re the storytellers and we create the mystery.” (Watkins could not be reached for comment. A source familiar with the production says Prime Video and Watkins parted ways on positive terms.)
“Creating the mystery” rather concisely describes the work that went into outlining season two. Outer Range launched on the fascinating, peculiar note of a taciturn cowboy named Royal Abbott (Brolin) encountering a giant metaphysical void on his vast Wyoming ranch—sparking the particular interest of a mercurial young drifter who shows up on his property, Autumn (Imogen Poots), and gradually involving both his family and that of his ranching rival, Wayne Tillerson (Will Patton).
We glean Royal is keeping secrets surrounding this strange occurrence. His daughter in law, Rebecca (Kristen Connolly), goes missing, and then later on, so too does his nine-year-old granddaughter, Amy (Olive Abercrombie). By the finale, we realize we’re in the thick of a dizzying time-travel saga: that Royal was actually born in the 19th century, the hole transporting him to the present day after he shot his father as a child, and that Autumn is actually Amy—from the future. Oh, and one other cliffhanger: With his daughter and wife both missing, Royal’s son Perry (Tom Pelphrey) helplessly jumps into the dark void after learning (some of) the truth. We have no idea where he wound up.
Such dense plotting unfurled against stunning Western backdrops—captured over an arduous eight-month shoot in New Mexico—and was enlivened by terrific performances, though Brolin laments not conveying the show’s ideas and answers with enough clarity. But Murray, a fan of season one, saw all of the finale’s game-changing twists as, ironically, the perfect way in. “At the end you went, ‘Oh my God, there’s so many directions you can go in, so many things you can answer and build on,’” he tells me. “What better place to enter a show?”
Outer Range’s second season opens in 1984, planting its flag in the realm of time-travel drama. We meet a young ranch hand and a close friend by his side (Christian James and Megan West) simply working the land. Then, by premiere’s end, we realize their true identities: It’s a younger Royal and his soon-to-be-wife, Cecilia (Lili Taylor in the main present timeline). They’re encountered by another character, from another timeline. This reveal sets the stage for the show’s fresh approach to narrative in season two, gamely hopping between different decades (and centuries) with newfound propulsion. The odd humor and esoteric dialogue, meanwhile, remain in place. “We didn’t want to lose things that we got from Brian that were incredible—the absurdity and the symbolism of the hole, and however you chose to define that as a viewer,” says Brolin.
An astrophysicist worked in the writers’ room to help map out the rules and realities of Outer Range’s version of time-travel. “But if we found a cool way to do something and we couldn’t tie it to an emotion, we didn’t do it,” Murray adds. “The biggest part of what time-travel meant to me and the writers was: How can this help us expose something that a character’s going through?” With Perry, who does return to the series, the void draws him in through his experiences of grief and isolation. “It becomes interactive for the viewer in that way, where you get to play out some of these fantasies of going to another time,” Brolin says.
Brolin likens the void’s significance to that of a drug. “It has this hold on you and it has this fear around it, and it’s how each person deals with that fear,” he says. “For Royal it was denial. He shot his father, he jumped in the hole, he came out at another time and he was adopted by this family—that basically saved his life.” Brolin expanded his list of duties on season two to include director, helming the pivotal penultimate episode, and he opens his debut on the show with an ominous quote from Royal that ties some of the series’ biggest ideas together: “Nobody understands time and what it really is.” That sentiment of uncertainty circles Autumn as she grapples with the nature of her existence in the aftermath of season one’s reveal. It haunts the youngest Abbott son, Rhett (Lewis Pullman), as he considers a life away from the mystery swallowing his family whole. And it consumes the Tillersons, especially sons Luke and Billy (Shaun Sipos and Noah Reid), as rivalries with the Abbotts and with each other come to a head.
The line also propels the season’s standout episode, a standalone directed by Reservation Dogs alum Blackhorse Lowe. It’s focused on Deputy Sheriff Joy (Tamara Podemski), who, after working to maintain order back in present-day Wyoming during season one, finds herself lost in the 1886 wilderness and forced to survive. In her spotlight, she plays the badass role of Western hero. “As an African-American, I know what’s missing from the lay of the land,” Murray says. “Let’s see a Native American female hero in this particular way. Let’s see her do some rootin’ tootin’ shootin’, like we used to see every Saturday morning when we’d get up to watch The Lone Ranger.”
Royal remains Outer Range’s center of gravity, of course, and faces a reckoning that speaks to Murray’s big question of the season: “What happens when a man who’s held so many secrets finally decides to tell the biggest one?” Most compellingly, we watch him navigate a fraught new dynamic with Cecilia, as she’s brought into the layers of mystery surrounding her husband and compelled to act—with Taylor and Brolin brilliantly playing off of one another and delivering powerhouse performances. “Cecilia’s like, ‘Fuck you, you’ve got to be kidding me—because of your secrets, it’s literally annihilated our family and our reality,” Brolin says. “That’s the messy shit that I want to go see. I identify with it. How do these people navigate through this? How do you navigate through a life?”
Murray calls it a kind of Close Encounters problem, a desire for truth that turns into a punishing reality. Whether the truth brings Cecilia and Royal closer together or pushes them apart is one of many subtler dramas driving the season. While answers come more clearly and frequently this time around, there’s still plenty of new wrinkles being introduced, many elements still dangling—ready to be plucked for a potential season three, as Murray hopes. “We bonded from the jump, we didn’t dance around each other—we went straight to the work,” Murray says of his relationship with Brolin. “Josh just said to me, ‘So I’ve got ideas about season three,’ and that means that I get to talk to him and hang out with him more.”
As the cast told me before the series premiere, Outer Range’s first-season shoot could be brutal. Freezing, long days. Tough conditions. “We were with people with a little lack of experience, so the idea of me running in the snow naked was super attractive to them—but for me, after 40 years, it was more like, Can I do this without dying [or] getting frostbitten?” Brolin says. “And [season two] was still difficult. We were out in the middle of nowhere. We were shooting a lot of nights.” But, he adds, coming back, figuring out the logistics of production and story better, it feels worth it—and then some. It reminds him of his other big 2024 project. “Even promoting Dune 2 right now, the first Dune was [released] during Covid and all that, and it did well—but not what it’s doing now,” Brolin says. “A lot of things that work like slow burns, they don’t necessarily hit right away.”
If there’s one thing to learn from Outer Range, there’s plenty of time left.
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