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The Abandons Critic Reviews
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43
Metascore Mixed or Average
positive
3 (14%)
mixed
14 (64%)
negative
5 (23%)
Showing 22 Critic Reviews
Dec 3, 2025
The genre is no longer a boys’ club but what’s even fresher in The Abandons is the theme of motherhood. Constance and Fiona run their families with a strong hand, their protectiveness a hair away from lunacy.
Dec 4, 2025
In many ways, it feels like we're only beginning to scratch the surface of what "The Abandons" has to offer. But as long as Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey are involved, audiences can expect fireworks.
Dec 5, 2025
Fiona Nolan and her family are the more interesting of the two, if only because how they came together. .... When Anderson and Headey are in scenes together, it’s hard to look away.
Dec 4, 2025
Many of The Abandons’ concerns were better and more interestingly examined in 2022’s The English (a revisionist western further revised by Hugo Blick and starring Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer as two rootless beings finding out what freedom means). But it remains a thoughtful, essentially sound production – and the script improves in quality if not depth.
Dec 4, 2025
It's easy to imagine a more entertaining version of The Abandons where Headey and Anderson really get to cook, but here they're just battling against unmemorable material.
Dec 4, 2025
It’s not a bad premise—or a fresh one, save for the diversity of the good guys. .... Their [Lena Headey and Gillian Anderson's] performances are so large and earnest and melodramatic—Mam in a broad Irish brogue, Constance with a pinched malevolence—that two actresses of their stature, never mind talent, would certainly have caught a whiff of the ham in the air. That said, the rest of the cast is solid. .... But it certainly moves along, powered by Mr. Sutter’s sense of narrative abundance.
Dec 4, 2025
Headey and Anderson indulge in the pitfalls that have bedeviled men in the western genre for a century is intriguing, and that excitement is sorely missed when the series overcomplicates things. By the end of seven episodes, it has diminished the blunt force of their blows when they finally get to literally and figuratively throw hands.
Dec 4, 2025
In spite of its strengths, The Abandons has got a weird, urgent quickness to it, a sense that it’s not really committing to telling this story, or is worried that if it strays too far from the central action, viewers will stop paying attention. .... There’s so much that’s left unsaid; with just seven episodes, there clearly wasn’t room for everything, but I really could have used some flashbacks.
Dec 3, 2025
The Abandons deploys its considerable advantages in service of something safely regurgitative, where characters’ emotions run only as deep as the dried-up banks of the Columbia River.
Dec 3, 2025
There may have been a glimmer of promise in the premise when The Abandons was first announced, especially for a genre that has rarely been led onscreen by women, but the plodding end product that was cobbled together after Sutter's departure can't successfully be carried on Anderson and Headey's strengths alone.
