Netflix just dropped The Abandons on December 4, and despite critics calling it everything from “plodding” to literally “everything wrong

with TV in 2025,” the show is sitting pretty at number two on the global streaming charts with 7.3 million views in its opening week.

Lena Headey and Gillian Anderson play rival matriarchs battling over land and silver in 1850s Washington Territory, and viewers are eating it up even though it has a brutal 23% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes.

 

 

The disconnect between critical reception and audience appetite tells you everything you need to know about what people actually want from Westerns in 2025, and it’s not what Taylor Sheridan has been selling.

The Abandons centers entirely on women’s power. Headey plays Fiona Nolan, a childless Irish widow who built a found family of orphans

 

 

she calls the Abandons, living on a cattle ranch in Jasper Hollow. Across from her is Anderson’s Constance Van Ness, an aristocratic mining magnate whose silver mines are running dry and who needs Fiona’s land to save her family’s fortune. Both women are widows. Both lead

 

 

their families. And, both will do anything to protect what’s theirs. And unlike the Dutton family saga that just wrapped on Paramount Network with 11.4 million viewers watching John Dutton’s story end, the men in The Abandons are supporting players in a war between two women who refuse to yield.

The show was created by Kurt Sutter, the mind behind Sons of Anarchy, though he left production three weeks before filming wrapped after creative disagreements with Netflix over the show’s direction. His initial pilot ran 100 minutes, which Netflix execs found concerning, leading to reshoots and a reduction from ten episodes to seven. Some episodes clock in under 39 minutes, which makes the whole thing feel choppy and rushed. But despite the production chaos and the critical savaging, audiences keep watching. It’s number three in the U.S. behind only Stranger Things and the Diddy documentary.

Yellowstone ended its run in December 2024 after a massively publicized split between star Kevin Costner and showrunner Taylor Sheridan. The final season averaged 10.3 million viewers, and the finale became the most-watched episode in series history. By every metric, the show was a cultural juggernaut. But it also spent five seasons centering toxic masculinity, land grabs, and a patriarch whose decisions shaped every storyline. Beth Dutton, played by Kelly Reilly, was supposed to be the show’s feminist counterbalance. She’s a corporate raider, she’s ruthless, and she takes no prisoners.

Except Beth isn’t really a woman. She’s Taylor Sheridan’s idea of what a badass woman should be. She talks to her dad about his sex life in scenes that play as uncomfortable instead of liberating. And, she threatens other women with sexual violence as a punchline. She has zero female friends and exists primarily to serve her father’s legacy and her husband Rip’s emotional needs.

Critics have pointed out for years that Beth feels like a “she for he” character, written by a man who thinks women gain power by acting like men. IndieWire called it Yellowstone’s Beth Dutton problem, arguing that Sheridan writes her less as a fully realized person and more as his conception of female strength filtered through a masculine lens.

The issue isn’t that Yellowstone had a male lead. The issue is that even its strongest female character existed in service to male storylines and male definitions of power. Beth’s trauma (forced sterilization, abuse, and her mother’s death) is never explored with the depth it deserves. Instead, it’s used as justification for why she’s angry and difficult, which are treated as her defining characteristics rather than symptoms of deeper wounds the show refuses to examine.