‘The Madison’ Review: Sheridan’s Weakest Show Yet?

Taylor Sheridan shows tend to be about cultural specters, the ghosts that fill a past, a place, a business, a legacy. In the case of “The Madison,” his new six-episode series for Paramount+, the specter is literal. The show is about a family’s grief after an unexpected loss.

That grief spans two settings: Manhattan and the Madison River Valley. In New York, the Madison is an avenue for luxury shopping, a stereotype of everything that is wrong with urban elitism (read: liberalism). In Montana, the Madison is a sun-dappled, trout-filled river that snakes through the mountainous landscape, symbolizing the greater meaning and purpose that is found in experiencing a natural place (read: traditionalism).

While this culture-war dichotomy and moralizing will feel familiar to fans of Sheridan’s shows, the problem in “The Madison” is its lazy overtness and how it overlaps with its female characters to turn them into caricatures and shortchange their stories.

In the show, New York City exists solely as a superficial trope, and this one-dimensional representation makes it impossible for the city storylines to counterbalance the Montana ones effectively. This is problematic because, unlike other Sheridan shows, “The Madison” centers mostly around the women in a family. Because these women are reduced to the ways they embody the stereotypical portrayal of the city from which they are from, they lack the complexity needed to hold the center of the show, and the plot is uneven as it vacillates between the two locations to tell their story.

This problem is clear from the beginning. The pilot episode opens with the family’s exorbitantly wealthy patriarch, Preston Clyburn (Kurt Russell), fly-fishing with his brother Paul (Matthew Fox). Preston isn’t catching any fish. The issue, his younger brother tells him, is his wrist. There’s too much action.

“Stop trying to hail a cab on Fifth Avenue,” Paul says. Of course, the city, the place where Paul’s wife and daughters live, is always the problem.

This becomes clear when the scene transitions from the brothers casting in the river to Paige (Elle Chapman), Preston’s youngest daughter, gracefully hustling down Fifth Avenue in heels while making a work call. Out of nowhere, she is punched in the face, and her Brunello Cucinelli shopping bags are stolen. She falls to the sidewalk and no one in the cold, selfish city even pauses to help her up, but one voyeuristic man does take a video, of course.

In shock, Paige immediately calls her mom, Stacy (Michelle Pfeiffer), who tells her to go straight to their private doctor.

“I’m going to look like a battered spouse,” Paige complains, as the doctor stitches up her cheek.

This insensitive comment is when Sheridan’s misogynistic lens and lazy writing become as crystal clear as the water that runs through the Madison’s rapids.

The current of his tropes gain strength after a family tragedy forces the women — Stacy, her oldest daughter Abigail (Beau Garrett) with her two daughters, and Paige with her husband Russell (Patrick J. Adams) — to visit Montana. There, they stay in cabins that are so close to the river there is no septic system, so they are forced to use an outhouse and pick food from the garden and eat meat that comes from animals with hooves.

For lack of a better expression, the women are fish out of water whose city ways (again, read liberal) make it hard for them to acclimate to a world of gluten and Indigenous people who call themselves “Indians.” The women are ridiculous because their city ways of life are ridiculous.

Abigail is reduced to a trust-fund divorcée who has never had to support herself or build a meaningful life. Her days consist of Pilates, therapy, cocktails and complaining, and her kids are mournfully elitist. Paige, the daughter who is supposedly the strong one, works, but she is just as spoiled, and her husband caters to her demands because he isn’t traditionally masculine enough to stand up to her like the beer-drinking cowboy Cady (Kevin Zegers) or sheriff Van (Ben Schnetzer) they meet in the valley. Mostly, Paige seems to exist to be sexualized, which is on brand with the way Sheridan has been criticized for portraying his young female characters. Paige’s hyper-sexualization becomes most obvious when she is stung by hornets while using the outhouse and spends an entire episode face-down with a swollen butt and stinging “kitty.”

The only female character with true complexity is Stacy, and this is less because the writing gives her agency — repeatedly, her actions are responsive as opposed to active — and more because Pfeiffer’s performance is messy and captivating, which develops the underwritten source material.

In one scene, she sits on the porch talking to her oldest daughter, emoting about how she has a “very small window to be reckless” and make decisions that feed her heart instead of her head. This is the most interesting through line of the show. How does grief shift one’s priorities? How does absence remold itself into presence and into a force that moves you to create meaning in your life instead of one that consumes you?

Stacy’s examination of these themes and the way she struggles through them with her daughters is what makes the story interesting, but it isn’t enough to make it feel like a balanced show. Instead, the first season, which takes place over the course of about a week but lacks the realism for this timeframe to seem true, feels like the prologue to a larger story waiting to be told in which Stacy and her daughters get to become real people.

Because “The Madison” has already been renewed for a second season, it is being given the chance to tell that story. The question is whether the show can use this space to correct its shortcomings and give its female characters more agency to figure out who they can become both on Madison Avenue and alongside the Madison River.

“The Madison” is streaming on Paramount+. The first three episodes are available. Episodes 4-6 stream on March 21.