Prime Video's 2-Part 'Yellowstone Meets Lost' Series Was Cancelled Too Soon

Josh Brolin starred in an offbeat Western that managed to give both Lost and the works of Taylor Sheridan a run for their money. Outer Range followed Brolin's melancholic Royal Abbott on his Wyoming ranch as his family navigated the ongoing disappearance of Royal's daughter-in-law, with matters made worse by his son's rage-fueled killing of a rival family member.

At its core, Outer Range was a family drama that wholeheartedly embraced its Western setting. Cowboy hats were worn almost universally, and many key conversations happened on horseback. Akin to the storytelling style Taylor Sheridan is now known for, Outer Range took care to showcase its majestic surroundings. Grand shots of mountains, forests, and open fields defined the show's aesthetic.

The real intrigue of the show, however, was the large, circular expanse of nothingness in the Abbott's West Pasture, which would come to be referred to simply as "the hole." Like many of the goings-on of Lost's island, the hole had an ominous, unnatural, mesmerizing quality to it. Even more similar, the characters of Outer Range all seemed to be fated or predestined to play a role in the hole's grand design.

As the show went on, Outer Range managed to become more and more evocative of both its sci-fi and its Western counterparts, ultimately becoming something completely itself in the process. The mind-bending mystery had drama on every layer, from the Abbott's interpersonal dynamics and financial struggles to a grand exploration of time, space, and destiny.

Outer Range Was Just Starting To Blossom In Its Second Season

Outer Range's first season was driven mainly by unanswered questions and the community's closing in on their cover-up of Trevor Tillerson's death. It was suspenseful and intriguing, but the early episodes were also plagued by Royal's frustrating and inexplicable refusal to tell his family about the hole. The season's penultimate episode, however, revealed that Royal's behavior wasn't so inexplicable after all.

From the beginning, Outer Range had alluded to the hole being tied to time travel. Dipping a hand or face into it seemed to result in visions of another point in time. When Royal was pushed into it altogether in one of the show's first episodes, he found himself on a frightening version of his own ranch, one that was heavily implied to be its future, before the hole spat him back out in the present.

Especially considering that Royal had decided to throw Trevor Tillerson's body into the hole, this all seemed like information he should have been sharing with his family all along. At the end of season 1, at long last, Royal dropped the bombshell that he was born in the year 1886 and had known about the hole for almost his entire life after jumping into it as a boy and arriving in the year 1968.

This reveal tipped Outer Range, which had been hovering on the outskirts of both genres, into a full-fledged sci-fi Western. Shortly after Royal's revelation, both his son Perry and the town Sheriff Joy travel to the past, allowing the show to showcase even more traditional Western stories with its own twist.

The Cancellation Of Outer Range Left So Many Questions Unanswered

Where season 1 leaned on atmosphere and mystery, Outer Range season 2 moved quickly with several concurrent storylines. In the process of detailing Joy's 1880s adventures and fateful encounter with a young Royal, alongside Perry's newfound friendship with younger versions of his own parents, Outer Range raised some questions about the rules of its time travel.

In the search for Joy, who was missing in the present, she was spotted in an old photograph taken in the 1880s. This suggested that rather than being able to change history, anyone who visited the past through the hole had "always already" been there. Even before she experienced it firsthand, Joy's presence in the 1880s was a fact of history.

However, Perry's experience called this into question. For one thing, it seemed odd that his parents, especially Royal, who knew the truth of Perry's identity when he met him as a young man, wouldn't recognize their present-day son as the man they had known many years ago.

The most notable wrench Outer Range threw in its own lore, however, came towards the end of season 2 when Perry ventured back into the hole, returned to the night he killed Trevor Tillerson, and changed the sequence of events. This definitively established an alternate timeline and directly contradicted Joy's experience in which her actions were an immovable fact of history.

This came across not as a plot hole, but as a yet-unexplored facet of the hole and Outer Range​​​​​​'s depiction of time travel. It served as a powerful conclusion to season 2 as it spun the twisty story into yet another new direction with countless implications ripe to be explored in a third season.

Unfortunately, Prime Video canceled the series after its second season, despite it having truly hit its stride after a slower-paced first outing. By the end of its run, Outer Range had combined the best elements of shows like Lost and Yellowstone, resulting in a unique world filled with compelling, complex characters. It all came together in a show with near-limitless untapped potential.