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.

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.

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.

A pretender through and through, piling on clichés without any sense of authenticity, rhythm, or originality.

The Abandons is never particularly bad, but it’s confusingly spare, rushed and vaguely shoddy, as if the final product was, in some way, gutted of its most potentially distinctive elements.

Despite its contentious creation, the true tragedy of “The Abandons” is that even in pieces, it still serves the same function as all those other shows: to make slop so prevalent, viewers won’t be able to separate the bad from the abandoned.

It’s almost worth watching as a sicko-mode voyeur, since the series is so disjointed and elliptical that it approaches anomaly and spectacle. But for viewers seeking entertainment, The Abandons makes it too easy to, well, abandon it.