Don’t Fall for Untamed’s Killer Opening

Untamed begins on a literal high. In the first scene, we zoom over Yosemite National Park, vast sky above and sprawling wilderness below, until the looming face of the gargantuan El Capitan comes into view. Two men crawl up its face toward the summit until the climber slips and his belay partner catches him, bearing the pair’s weight so they don’t fall thousands of feet to the ground below. And then, from the cliff top, something plummets toward them — a body, disintegrating as it hits the mountain, rips the men off their bolts and anchors and gets tangled in their ropes. Untamed lingers on the body’s bluish decay and gouged limbs, a macabre counter to the suggestion that being outside will rejuvenate your spirit and your body. It’s a shocking and unsettling introduction, and it’s also the moment at which Untamed peaks. In the following six episodes, the meandering miniseries never reaches these heights again.

Netflix’s latest partnership with Mark L. Smith, creator and writer of this year’s American Primeval, Untamed is on its surface another exploration of this country’s wildest corners. Just look at the adjectives: Primeval! Untamed! These shows promise a level of grittiness that the former actually delivered with its mud-soaked cinematography and thesis connecting America’s historical bloodthirstiness with its imperial sprawl. American Primeval’s script was somewhat generic and its slow-burn romance fairly predictable, but the story and visuals were so immersive and so grandiose that they swept us into this pointed sojourn into the past. Untamed, however, doesn’t think that big. Smith and his daughter, co-creator and co-writer Elle Smith, scale down their approach — one mystery, one pair of detectives, one grieving family — and the resulting story feels thin, its character motivations rote. Where American Primeval felt like it was punching above its Netflix-limited-series weight class to deliver a western that was genuinely critical of its own genre, Untamed is a tidy collection of cop-show clichés. And worst of all, it’s one that could have been set anywhere, that has very little to say about America’s public lands, and that has no real perspective about nature past a superficial “It can heal you” message.

Eric Bana stars as Kyle Turner, an agent with the National Park’s Investigative Services Bureau; of the National Park System’s 433 sites across the country, the ISB has personnel at more than 420 of them. In typical Bana mode, Turner is a kind of stick in the mud, an upright and uptight officer of the law who is unbothered by his colleagues’ dislike: One ranger snarkily calls him “Gary fucking Cooper,” while the park superintendent is irritated by how little Turner cares about selling the park as safe to tourists. But Turner is a Good Cop and a Good Man, a guy who in his first minutes onscreen hunts poachers, is kind to his young son, rappels down El Capitan to examine the woman’s corpse himself, and challenges the other responding agents’ assumption that she was trying to kill herself. While the park wants to brush off the incident so that visitors don’t get scared of coming to Yosemite, Turner is sure it’s a murder, and Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago), the new park ranger assigned to work the case with him, is increasingly convinced he’s right. As they work to discover the identity of the dead young woman and what led her to this brutal end, Turner teaches the skeptical Vasquez about the tranquility of the park, and she chips away at his forbidding shell to reveal the wounded man underneath. Their partnership unexpectedly changes them both, yadda yadda yadda.

Bana plays Turner with authoritative, steady-voiced calmness that’s effective when he’s talking shop with Santiago’s Vasquez or Sam Neill as Yosemite’s chief park ranger Paul Souter. But Bana is not as believable when asked to drop his stony demeanor and display vulnerability, a shortcoming that hampers his arc in the back half of the season. Within only six episodes, Untamed packs in a fair amount of cop-show standards: There are dirty officers, government malfeasance, romantic partners of these agents who don’t get the full attention of their lovers because their jobs are so important, a lingering mystery that no one has been able to solve for years, and a bad guy with a gun who can only be stopped by a good guy with a gun. These are the classics, and any show in this genre is going to have some mix of them. But the greatest failure of Untamed is that — aside from an underdeveloped subplot involving Yosemite’s Indigenous community — few of these plot points are genuinely unique to the park, giving the show a generic vibe that’s only exacerbated by how clearly this show about Yosemite was not actually filmed at Yosemite.

The experience of watching that opening scene basically mirrors that of watching Untamed in its entirety. Once you get past the shock of the woman’s body slamming into the climbers, you’ll notice how heavily CGI’d it all is, how fake the pine trees look, how tightly the shots are framed to mask the fact that they’re nowhere near El Cap and perhaps not even actually outdoors. A certain amount of suspended disbelief is of course required for all TV. Yet Untamed’s insistence that this place is integral to its plot — the lake where Turner hangs out with his son, the barn where Vasquez first encounters a horse — when those spots are so visually shortchanged makes the series’ obviously not-filmed-on-location quality that much more jarring. The series was filmed in British Columbia, Canada, and all the soaring drone shots of mountain ranges and dense forests can’t make up for the lack of specificity when Untamed is on the ground. Yosemite has two distinctly different biomes and an array of unique wildlife, and Untamed’s version of this singularity is basically a zoomed-out screensaver.

That’s the fundamental dissonance of Untamed: It wants to present the National Parks as a place of both wonder and danger, somewhere where you might be entranced by the shining stars at night, then the next morning stumble upon a horde of machete-wielding, off-the-grid survivalists. Within that whiplash is supposed to be some truth about the human experience and our fluid definition of America, but Untamed so shallowly presents the National Parks that the series never really draws you in enough to care about either the splendor or the menace. The gorgeousness of the National Parks has been covered by various docuseries, and the system unexpectedly housing an array of criminal activity and a wealth of mystery is also well-documented. Untamed didn’t need to reach the thoroughness of any of those other projects, but its central plot is so formulaic, and the series so tentative in making any larger argument about how we alternately romanticize and abuse nature, that Untamed never bushwhacks its way into its own identity. The series’ first scene is a banger, and it’s all downhill from there.