Untamed: Season 1

Was Eric Bana the Hulk at some point? Wasn’t he also like the “it” boy for two seconds in the early 2000s, around the time he was in Munich? And then — with the exception of 2009’s The Time Traveler’s Wife — I haven’t seen the guy since. Honestly, I kind of forgot he was a thing. But, weirdly, when I heard he was starring in this little-promoted Netflix series about a cop who hangs out in Yosemite, I thought, for some completely unknown reason, that he was slumming it. Too big for this seemingly dinky part in a procedural television show set in the wilderness of California. No clue why, it’s just what came to mind. By the way, is it just me or does Netflix love these one-name series? It’s probably just me. It’s not just me.

I visited Yosemite as a kid several times. On one school trip the stupid boys in my class surrounded a bear and pointed at it until our middle school principal ran out and screamed at everyone that the bear would “rip their nuts off.” On a separate school trip, I came out of my tent-like cabin and was face-to-ass with yet another bear rooting through the trash. I was a pretty puny kid, but it was big. There was a dude in my high school who held some sort of speed record for climbing the Nose of El Capitan, which serves prominently in this series. Point is, Yosemite was a thing in my youth, so I was drawn to the series in a way that, say, Ms. Hipster, who grew up in NY, wasn’t. And then — like all these types of shows — a woman’s body appears. But this one plummets from the top of El Capitan. Gnarly. And, like every one of these shows, the dude who shows up to investigate is a cranky jerk. This one, Kyle Turner (Bana), is a special agent in something called the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch. Which is apparently a real thing. Why is he cranky? Well, he’s divorced and his kid was murdered and he drinks too much and is too much of both a rule follower and a rule breaker. And if this sounds familiar, it should. It’s the broken white-guy investigator trope in a nutshell. You’re welcome.

Turner spends the rest of the series oscillating between investigating this woman’s murder, pissing people off and struggling with suicidal ideation. He gains a deputy in Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago), a former LAPD cop, who spends the series also investigating the murder, but also being constantly disappointed by her new boss, but also learning that perhaps there was more going on with him and his ex-wife, Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt) than meets the eye. An ex-wife whose new husband, Josh Randall, is weirdly understanding about her oddball relationship with her ex who drunkenly stalks her and constantly seems to put her in danger with his investigative mishigas. The show is one of those quiet ones, depending a lot on the vistas of the park to make up for the lack of action and repetitive, but totally convoluted, plotting. There’s something about it — and I have no succinct reasoning here — that felt foreign. Like an Italian wrote it. Not to besmirch Italians, but you know when you watch a show in English that was written by a mainland European? Or an Italian movie overdubbed into English. There’s just something uncanny valley about the whole thing. Names are weird. Things are genericized in a way that feels unaware of American culture. Humans don’t quite act the way humans act. As an example, there’s a whole device in the plot that revolves around the drug trade. The drug being “pills.” Just pills. They never say what the pills are, never really show them. Only the bottles they’re in, which could be vitamin c. Or melatonin. It’s really, really weird. There are tens of scenes where they talk about “the pills,” with a thousand chances to say what they are. Yet nobody ever says out loud what these things are. It seems almost intentionally stripped of its specificity so it can play in markets that don’t know what, say, methamphetamine is. Wherever that may be.

The acting here is pretty variable. Bana is fine as the brooding drinker. He emotes in that Australian way that never quite gives enough of a shit about anything. The beard looks good on him, though. Lily Santiago, ostensibly the second lead, has a really oddball acting style. Her cadence is unusual, and her flat affect is not exactly typical of this type of show. I’m not sure if it’s a character choice or just the way she always delivers her lines, but at first I was both confused and thought that perhaps she was a novice. Turns out she’s not new to acting, so I’ll chalk it up to Santiago assuming her character was… well, I don’t want to speculate. But suffice it to say, she made a choice, stuck to it and I’m still on the fence if it was passable. The rest of the cast seemed to be in a different show at times than Bana. Honestly, half the series he seemed to be living inside his head; imagining his life had his son lived and talking to ghosts while both drunk and sober. There are a couple jokey characters and some other actors — including a group of hippie squatters in the park that I can’t imagine the government would ever let happen — who are all turnt up to eleven. Plus, a telltale tattoo that is infused with gold — a thing that the Internet tells me isn’t a thing that can actually happen. And the trope of the father who couldn’t save his own child, so maybe he could redeem himself by finding justice for another young person. I know this series was by the same creator as American Primeval — a series I watched and had similar thoughts about — but it’s surprising the kind of grab bag of tropes that they loosely tied together here. Including Native American “magic” and the obligatory shootout. There are also an inordinate amount of bodies for what you have to assume would normally be a pretty slow-paced job patrolling a park. It does seem that despite this being outlined as a limited series that there will be a season two. Hard to imagine there will be more mayhem in Yosemite, but I guess this is television and not real life. Good luck to them.