Summary
Untamed probably isn’t the kind of show you’d expect it to be, but beneath the wilderness aesthetic and genre framework is an intimate, character-driven story of grief and trauma.
Untamed is a much less interesting show than I expected it to be. This is a criticism, I suppose, but it feels like more of an observation. The show’s title and marketing imply a lawless, hostile wilderness that isn’t really reflected in a story that mostly follows the typical structure of any old murder-mystery, albeit occasionally stopping for drone footage of landscapes, obvious use of green screen, and the odd animal that looks like it has been sprung to life from PS2-era computer graphics. It’s like Dept. Q if the office were in the back garden instead of the basement.
This doesn’t matter as much as you’d think. It’s a contradiction – a show about Yosemite National Park and its people and environs, filmed in Canada and much more interested in man-made problems than natural ones – but not a damning one. The core of Untamed is still solid, however reliant on tropes it might be, and unlike most Netflix shows, it also has an excellent, earned ending with a ton of emotional and narrative payoff. It’s a great example of how to make a familiar show very well, but not such a great one of how to market a familiar show as something that it isn’t.
Created by Mark L. Smith (American Primeval, which is much better) and Elle Smith, Untamed is about Kyle Turner (Eric Bana), an Investigative Services Branch (ISB) agent of the National Parks Service. When a young woman goes tumbling from the summit of El Capitan, he’s tasked with finding out whether she fell or was pushed, either literally or figuratively, a task complicated by his own tortured past and pressure from the park superintendent, Lawrence Hamilton (Joe Holt, Paradise), to wrap things up as quickly as possible so as not to frighten tourists away.
To speed things along, Turner is assigned a new partner in the form of park ranger Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago), a recent transfer from L.A. with her own share of personal issues relating to her four-year-old son, Gael (debutant Omi Fitzpatrick-Gonzales), and Gael’s abusive father (JD Pardo, High Potential, Hypnotic, F9). They’re the classic odd couple you’d find in any decent crime show – Turner’s antisocial, cynical, and rides a horse, while Vasquez is idealistic, naive, and drives a car. Part of the growth of these characters is them meeting in the middle and both riding a horse, because that’s what you do in a national park.
I’m being a little bit snarky, granted, but this is most of what Untamed has to say about life in communion with Mother Nature. There are hints of other things elsewhere, but they’re almost all either abandoned completely or underdeveloped. Lawrence, the official representative of the park itself, only shows up a couple of times and is always moaning when he does. There are subplots involving a group of squatters who have settled on the land illegally but are allowed to remain as long as they don’t cause trouble, which they seem to do habitually, and the native Miwok people who are represented almost exclusively through Turner’s friend Jay Stewart (Raoul Max Trujillo), who sometimes has to tell other Native people not to slam the door in his face when he asks tough questions. It all feels very surface-level and tangential to the core mystery, which is not distinct from any other murder in any other crime show in its motive, method, or aftermath.
Where Untamed undeniably excels is in exploring that mystery through the very specific lens of its tortured characters. I don’t want to give too much away, since there’s a fairly key twist at the end of the first episode that re-contextualises some things, but suffice it to say that the show’s narrative is very much about grief, loss, and trauma, and its core relationships – especially the ones between Turner and Vasquez and Turner and his ex-wife, Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt, The Boys, Lessons in Chemistry, Pantheon) – speak to this. Bana treats the material with impressive seriousness and meets his character’s low points with the highs of a totally committed performance, and he’s well-matched by DeWitt, Santiago, and others like Sam Neill (Jurassic World: Dominion, Invasion) as his father figure, Paul Souter, and Wilson Bethel (Daredevil: Born Again, All Rise) as an antagonistic Wildlife Control agent.
Virtually everything good about this show lives in the quiet character interactions between major plot turns. Aside from an excellent suspense sequence in Episode 3, the most powerful moments are all low-key, and sometimes come from unexpected sources like an inconsequential police interview with one of those squatters. The mystery itself is fine, but the reason the ending works so well is not because of how it’s resolved, but what its resolution means for the characters who are intimately tied up in it. Here, if nowhere else, Untamed really succeeds.
This, then, isn’t the review I was expecting to be writing. But we are where we are, and it’ll be useful for people coming into this blind – or close to it – to understand where its priorities lie. The wilderness isn’t the point, and neither is the murder that occurs in it, though you’d be forgiven for assuming so. Instead, both are an excuse for a surprisingly intimate and character-driven therapy session, one that ranges from a bit misjudged to wildly, powerfully effective. Your own mileage may vary, but I’d say it’s worth the trek.
