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Preston Clyburn (Kurt Russell) is laughing at trout. “Hah-hah,” says the rugged retiree, up to his buttocks in river as a Yellowstone cutthroat sploshes obligingly into his net. “I’m keepin’ it, and you’re cookin’ it,” he barks at his younger brother, Paul, who would rather Preston release the hapless vertebrate back into the wild but nevertheless respects his sibling’s need to connect with his inner Cro-Magnon (“the love of fishin’ goes back to early man …”).
Paul is played by Matthew Fox, who was once in Lost but is now marooned in a drama that requires him to say things like: “I make a memory a day, brother … sometimes more.” Despite this, Paul, too, is laughing. “Heh,” he says, as he and Preston splash and frolic in their matching utility slacks. “Heheheh.”
Such is the power of the Madison valley, an untamed stretch of rural Montana that provides this six-part Paramount+ series with its title and a setting in which its characters can laugh, love and deliver homespun homilies while smirking in plaid.
But what’s this? The aerial shots of mountains and elk start to wobble and Preston’s guffawing face dissolves into a montage of cars and skyscrapers. The mood darkens. We are now in “New York City”, where danger abounds. And oh dear, here is Preston’s gormless daughter Paige (Elle Chapman), who is about to be separated from her Hermès scarf by a snarling yobbo.
“I was on Fifth Avenue, Mom!” she sobs, post-mugging. “If you can’t walk on Fifth Avenue, where can you walk?”
“You can’t,” snaps Mom (Michelle Pfeiffer, emitting all the warmth of an abandoned Antarctic outpost). “That’s the whole point.”
Before we have time to ponder the meaning of Mom’s response (what whole point?), we’re back in Montana, where an impending storm bears with it both The Madison’s inciting incident and a spoiler.
As the brothers are returning to Paul’s ranch after another joint fly-fishin’ session, his Cessna gets caught in a thunderstorm and slams into a mountain. RIP Preston and Paul. U are wiv da anglers now.
Mom (AKA Stacy) is distraught. What to do?
“You had a loving marriage for 40 years in New York City,” gasps her elder daughter, Abigail (Beau Garrett). “I mean, they should build a statue of you!”
Stacy simpers into her enormous glass of wine. “Yes,” says her tearful smile. “They should.”
The answer? A lengthy – and possibly permanent – family sob-batical on Paul’s ranch, where Preston kept a cosy holiday cabin (Stacy had apparently never visited this before, finding the prospect of an outdoor bog “disgusting”). Here, amid a blizzard of plangent Preston-based flashbacks, Stacy will reassess her pampered city lifestyle (boo) while attempting to embrace the plain-talkin’ values beloved of her late husband and the rural west (yee-haw).
The Madison is the creation of Taylor Sheridan, whose Yellowstone franchise is one of modern TV’s least modern successes: an unreconstructed hotbed of cattle and testosterone in which grizzled ranchers grumble about land developers while fiddling with their spurs. The Madison shares Yellowstone’s reverence for the conservatism of wealthy rural Montana, but it’s an altogether milder kettle of trout. It is, in essence, a Saga cruise in a Stetson; a languid meditation on retirement stuffed with cloying aphorisms and thuddingly simplistic depictions of grief. There is the suspicion that production meetings involved liberal use of the word “females”.
Cue scenes in which Stacy drifts about in her designer widow-wear while a) crying into horses’ faces, b) recalling Preston’s semi-serious sermons on masculinity (“men thrive when they’re singularly focused!”) and c) calling her granddaughters “spoiled little bitches”, because the only thing The Madison fears more than the city is the under-40s. (There are many terrible jokes about pronouns and gluten.)
As we suffer yet another aerial shot of the Clyburns clomping Hobbit-like through swaying fields of gold, the penny drops: Montana is The Shire. NYC, of course, is Mordor. “When was the last time you saw a sunset?” Stacy asks her huffy, screen-addicted granddaughters. “Can’t remember? No, me neither.” Well, obviously you can’t, because Manhattan doesn’t have sunsets; it has the Eye of Sauron, glowering over everyone’s avocado starters.
Will Stacy survive the indignities of comfortable country living and learn how to laugh at trout? The answer is yawnin’ in the wind.
