Taylor Sheridan’s ‘Yellowstone’ Has Found a Worthy Rival in Netflix’s Newest Western Drama

Taylor Sheridan has ruled the modern TV Western for so long it’s easy to forget the genre existed before grumpy cowboys started monologuing about land rights and threatening their enemies with trips to a nonexistent train station. Yellowstone and its sprawling family of spin-offs have basically turned the prestige-TV frontier into one giant Dutton-branded amusement park – rugged, melodramatic, and unmistakably male. But every empire falls (or, at the very least, gets complacent), and this week, Netflix is rolling up with the kind of firepower that suggests it’s ready to start a little frontier warfare of its own.

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

Set in the Washington Territory of 1854, The Abandons drops viewers into a frontier on the brink of becoming a war zone. The premise is fairly simple: a ruthless industrialist and a hardened matriarch both want the same land… and the piles of silver under it. What follows is less a traditional Western and more a territorial power brawl where everyone has a gun and a traumatic backstory ready to load in the chamber. Tonally, think Yellowstone if the women were already running the ranch and had zero hesitation about firing the first shot. It’s dusty, operatic, and cutthroat in a way prestige shows with main female leads aren’t always allowed to be.

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.

If this all feels a bit Godless-adjacent, that’s by design. Netflix’s 2017 limited series set the tone for moody, female-led frontier violence, but The Abandons levels it up with dirtier politics and power grabs by women who don’t qualify as underdogs but cold, calculating antiheroes. The series makes it clear that Netflix isn’t playing in the sandbox for nostalgia’s sake – it’s trying to reshape the playing field. And frankly, the genre is overdue for that kind of shake-up. The Abandons keeps the hallmarks fans crave, the violence, the vendettas, the territorial grudge matches, but reframes them through women who refuse to play as the genre’s usual moral referee. It’s one of the rare Westerns that suggests the frontier gets far more compelling when power isn’t handed down, but clawed after by whoever’s bold enough to seize it.

Release Date

December 4, 2025

Network

Netflix