The Madison is Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan’s new show on Paramount+. But I can’t actually tell you what it’s about because the MAGA-coded streaming service has embargoed any mention of the crucial events in the very first episode that serve as the catalyst for its entire story.
So consider this a review of a series I am not really, in fact, allowed to review.
Without revealing the material’s supposedly big spoiler, what can be said about The Madison is laughably incomplete, but here’s a best effort: Written by Taylor Sheridan, the six-part drama (March 14) was originally envisioned as a present-day Yellowstone spin-off (à la Marshals), only to later be reconfigured as a stand-alone affair.
On the basis of this initial season, that’s a negligible change, given that in most respects, the TV mogul’s latest is the same as his prior New West offerings, full of two-dimensional types, clunky dilemmas, and absurd and old-hat urban vs. rural dynamics that were out of date 50 years ago.
As for its plot, The Madison revolves around Stacy Clyburn (Michelle Pfeiffer), the confident and put-together socialite wife of Preston (Kurt Russell), who travels from New York City to Montana to temporarily stay on the remote and bucolic plot of land adored by her spouse and owned by her recluse brother-in-law, Paul (Matthew Fox).
Joining her are adult daughters Abby (Beau Garrett) and Paige (Elle Chapman), the former a bruised mother of two who’s recovering from a brutal divorce, and the latter an abrasive spitfire married to submissive Russell (Patrick J. Adams).
Together, they’re an out-of-place bunch whose time in the great wide open is chockablock with learning experiences, all of which are cartoonishly corny, such as city girl Paige using their rustic abode’s outhouse (because there’s no indoor plumbing!) and getting stung on (and in) her private parts by angry hornets.
While Montana isn’t their natural environment, the Clyburns make it work because, according to The Madison, urban living is the pits! This point of view is epitomized by an introductory scene in which Paige, walking down crowded Fifth Avenue during the daytime, is slugged in the face and robbed by a mugger.
This reinforces Preston’s—and perhaps Sheridan’s—opinion that the Big Apple is unpleasant and dangerous, and that Paige should always get around via private car in order to protect herself from the crime-ridden metropolis’ evil denizens. If this all sounds like fanciful culture-war nonsense to you, that’s probably because you’ve seen the relatively banal reality of New York City for yourself.
Paige’s assault on arguably the city’s least perilous avenue is part and parcel of The Madison’s political ludicrousness. Yet it’s not the reason Stacy and company briefly relocate to Montana. The actual impetus for that shift, however, is not to be uttered aloud, even though Stacy’s subsequent tale is wholly about her and her daughters’ stabs at coping with sorrow in a pastoral Eden that means much to their paterfamilias.
Similarly verboten is any talk about who else is with her in this locale, whose shimmering rivers and radiant fields are incessantly romanticized by director Christina Alexandra Voros (who helms all six installments) and Breton Vivian’s sensitive-strings score.
The Madison habitually contrasts the cool shininess of Manhattan with the warm sunlight-drenched landscapes of Montana, and puts its urbanites in awkward positions, such as when Stacy’s granddaughter Macy (Alaina Pollack) rudely decries their cowboy neighbor Cade Harris (Kevin Zegers), labeling a dish he calls “Indian tacos” as “racist.”
Sheridan likes to raise thorny issues and then split the difference. Still, his real focus is Stacy, whose arduous struggle to come to terms with the thing we can’t tell you about is complicated by her brood, whose constant bickering is a source of much simplistic and groan-worthy drama.
Pfeiffer gives a strong performance as the anguished Stacy, her toughness offset (and ultimately fueled) by her misery.
The Madison, however, is the sort of silly endeavor that has the matriarch tell her daughters that the sole “real man” they’ve ever met is their Montana-bred dad—presumably because “real men” fly fish and prefer making coffee on stoves in cabins.
This is par for the Sheridan course, and it extends to both his conception of Adams’ Russell as an emasculated goof—he drinks craft beers, rides a Peloton, and enjoys being bossed around by Paige—and an eventual romantic relationship that, despite being telegraphed from the moment one character appears on screen, is also verboten to discuss in reviews.
The Madison’s characterizations are as broad as those in Sheridan’s other series, most notably Russell’s Preston, a husband and father who cherishes being in nature, dislikes modernity, and admits that despite spoiling his children rotten, he can’t help it because, as he tells Stacy in a flashback about one of their kids, “Picking her up when she falls is my job.”
Russell’s charisma hasn’t waned a bit since his early Hollywood days, but Sheridan idealizes Preston to the hilt, even as he refuses to provide even basic facts about him, such as the nature of the business that’s earned him untold wealth.
Sheridan pushes the same buttons as before with The Madison, and he’s so obvious about it that—save for its big secret twist—there’s no surprise to any single development in its maiden season.
In virtually every way, it feels like an A.I. fed with Yellowstone and Landman scripts could have churned out something more or less identical to it. As with Kevin Costner and Billy Bob Thornton, Pfeiffer is good enough as the show’s tough, if vulnerable, lead that she keeps the proceedings afloat. Yet there’s only so much she can do with recycled and torpid storylines that have nothing original to say and are destined to end in one fashion.
Unlike the NCIS-ish tack taken by Marshals, The Madison sticks closely to Yellowstone’s template, the difference being that it has none of that predecessor’s darker criminal undercurrents, leaving it simply a soggy retread. With a second season already planned, the question is, what happens once these fish get comfortable out of water?
The answer is hard to imagine, although whatever it is, one thing seems certain: I won’t be able to say anything meaningful about it in advance.
