Further mucking up Royal’s life is the fact that, in his attempt to protect Perry, he tosses the dead Tillerson’s body in the void - which, to be fair, is not an entirely unreasonable idea under the circumstances. His efforts are complicated by the arrival of the show’s other main Lynchian element, Autumn (Imogen Poots), an enigmatic backpacker who seems to know a thing or two about voids. When Royal chances upon it, he’s understandably spooked, but for reasons not immediately revealed to the viewer, he’s compelled to keep it a secret, even from his family. The Twin Peaks imprimatur principally comes in the form of a big ol’ void that inexplicably appears in a remote corner of the Abbotts’ pasture and pierces a hole in time and space. As a family unit, they’re a ball of repressed nerves until a spontaneous act of chaos results in Perry killing a Tillerson, and the subsequent cover-up draws the suspicions of their Wyoming town’s politically ambitious local sheriff, Joy (Tamara Podemski). Their younger son, Rhett (Lewis Pullman), is a competitive bull rider who wonders if he should get out of Dodge, while elder son Perry (Tom Pelphrey) is grieving the disappearance of his wife while caring for his young daughter, Amy (Olive Abercrombie). The Abbotts are the spitting image of the mythologized American-heartland family: Royal, the classically taciturn cowboy type - Carhartt jacket, squints, grunts - is world-weary and lacking faith in God, a contrast to his wife, Cecilia (Lili Taylor), who goes to church and Bible study with intensity. The story follows Royal Abbott (Brolin), the patriarch of a modest ranching family locked in a struggle over land rights with its wealthier neighbors, the Tillersons. The show was created by Brian Watkins, a playwright whose works typically deal with the themes and settings of the American West ( Wyoming, My Daughter Keeps Our Hammer), and it has consistently been described as “ Yellowstone meets Twin Peaks,” which is a generally annoying pitch but mostly right. Outer Range comes courtesy of Amazon Studios and is the second release from its deal with Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment following Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of The Underground Railroad. Then, suddenly, comes this moment in the second episode: Noah Reid of Schitt’s Creek fame, wearing nothing but a pair of tighty-whities, singing Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing” into the mirror at the top of his lungs. I was intrigued: Is this camp? But as the pilot settles into by-the-book exposition, Outer Range starts to feel like a blatant attempt to cash in on Hollywood’s blossoming romance with Taylor Sheridan’s brand of western mythmaking. It opens with a horse galloping in slo-mo under storm clouds, overlaid by Josh Brolin’s narration, a mix of cowboy poet and dorm-room philosopher: “You know anythang about a Greek god called Chronos?” The sequence is so self-serious, so stoic, so very masc it’s almost hilarious.

That weirdness is alive in Outer Range, and in that sense, the show feels as true, if not truer, to the modern American West than anything on Paramount Network right now.

It’s a place where religious fundamentalists buy up whole towns, billionaires colonize to cosplay as cowboys, and the vast expanse of land can hide all sorts of strange and worrisome things. The modern American West is deeply weird. Photo: Richard Foreman/Amazon Prime Video

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