Last weekend my wife and I binge watched a series from Amazon Prime. It was OUTER RANGE, a Western/science fiction combination that I heard about in watching one of the stars, Josh Brolin, as he ate through the hot sauce on wings challenge on the show HOT ONES. I’m a fan of Brolin’s work, and while I was skeptical of the genre combination, the program works. It originally started airing in October 2022 and ran for eight episodes.

The basic plot involves a family with relationship issues living on their ranch in Wyoming. There is the usual land dispute with a neighboring ranch found in many Westerns, but what makes this program unique comes by way of the science fiction element. One day while searching for some missing cattle, Josh Brolin’s character (Royal Abbott) discovers a mysterious hole in the ground. He drops something in it to test it’s depth, and it seems very deep, if not endless. To add even more intrigue, there is a layer of dark mist over the surface of it, and it creates a strange reaction to mind and body when one’s hand is put into it.

Beyond the interesting narrative and the drama of human conflict, the series surprised me with its frequent, indeed integral incorporation of religious questions and deep doubt in regards to the same. Repeatedly the characters wonder whether their lives could have been different or whether they are just living out the lives that fate has handed them. The Abbott family identifies as Christian, and attends weekly service in a small church, but Royal sits in the back reading a newspaper. This is an early indication that Royal’s character wrestles with his faith, and has perhaps even lost it due to harsh experiences in life. And they keep mounting over the course of the series. I have included a video clip from the series with this post. It is the regular evening prayer for the Abbott family around the dinner table. Something unusual happens this night in that after an especially challenging set of circumstances, rather than Royal’s wife offering the prayer, Royal asks if he can do it. The way he prays is honest, angry, and gut-wrenching.

I read a Christian author’s review of the series and it was this doubt and existential angst that the author found most off-putting and unattractive in a series dealing with religion. I must be cut from different cloth. I found the way in which religious commitments clash with real life challenges to be one of the more honest and refreshing treatments of religion in post-Christendom American entertainment. I wonder if the Christian author who decried the depiction of religion and God in OUTER RANGE has read much by way of the anger and lament in the Psalms?