Critic Reviews

“The Outer Range” may be a damaged family drama with the catchy hook of inexplicable, uncanny genre, but its most profound and moving qualities may be its ideas of faith and meaning and what happens when the unexplainable shatters what’s left of your beliefs.

For a show to embrace the strange elements of the cosmos and intertwine them with everyday life as well as Outer Range does is worth praising for that alone. It is both creative and cathartic, revealing much about the family at its center even as it finds splendor in the overwhelming awe of the unknown.

An economy of dialogue and a protraction of plot serve Outer Range well, as the mystery of the big spooky hole in the Abbotts’ west pasture isn’t the point of the series so much as its psychological fulcrum.

If time is a river, the “Outer Range” waters are still cold and challenging, but the various branches of the stream and the unpredictable manner in which things flow are always deep and absorbing stuff worthy of your attention.

"Outer Range" certainly corrals one's attention, wrangling a herd of plotlines into just the first of eight episodes. ... The creator of "Outer Range," newcomer Brian Watkins, is clearly striving for a gothic-in-the-great-outdoors atmosphere and is successful at it, even without the portal.

It’s impossible to touch on every nook and cranny of “Outer Range” without spoiling its surprises. Just know that every corner holds a secret, that every metaphysical query leads toward a more puzzling mystery. And yet, the emotional weight of the show never gets bogged down by reveals.

The bigger leaps that Outer Range takes and the more expansive story it tells are only part of what makes this second season even better than the already solid first. Sometimes, the best television is just about a bearded Josh Brolin on horseback looking into a black hole that has upended his character’s life and everyone in his orbit.

The revelations that came after "Outer Range" had made its "Yellowstone"-on-'shrooms debut were outrageously farfetched and fanciful. But one returns to season 2 eager to see where it can all go, which is well beyond what one is likely to expect.

“Outer Range” emphasized drama over sci-fi in Season 1, but Season 2, all of which is available now, cranks up both the time-travel-portal aspect and the outrageous soapiness. The hole is less a profound mystery and more an incredibly handy mechanism for creating bananas telenovela moments. .... But oh, what fun. What menace. What a total bonanza. “Outer Range” has so much to give, even if some of that is time-loop baloney.

This is a series that drops in hints and clues and moments of foreshadowing in sometimes frustratingly small doses (we want answers, now!), but when the reveals do come, we’re shocked and delighted, and somehow all the madness begins to make some kind of sense.