'Untamed' Is a B Show That Wants to Be an A Show

Netflix's Yosemite-set murder mystery limited series is no walk in the park

The majesty of CGI Yosemite. Netflix; Hannah Roman

Have you ever been to Yosemite? It’s pretty spectacular. The first time I went was during the winter. I had just moved to California, and didn’t realize that the whole park was under about three feet of snow. I got gouged on snow chains from the one store selling them outside the park entrance, but once inside, my group pretty much had the place to ourselves. It was really special to be among the sequoias with almost no one else around. It was so peaceful, which it was not when I went back last fall. I didn’t go to Yosemite Valley until that trip. The first time, the road was closed because someone who apparently didn’t have snow chains on their car slid off the road and died. Yosemite’s a dangerous place.

The danger of the park — both natural and human — is the animating idea behind Untamed, a murder mystery limited series that’s now on Netflix. Eric Bana plays Kyle Turner, an Investigative Services Branch agent of the National Parks Service. When it’s an accident, the park rangers handle it. When it’s a crime, the ISB does the detective work. And if Untamed is to be believed, you’re almost as likely to be murdered in Yosemite as you are to slip and fall.

The series starts with rock climbers whose ascent up El Capitan is interrupted by the falling body of a young woman. She gets tangled in their ropes as she plummets. When Kyle shows up at the scene, the body is still hanging, and a storm is heading in that will make retrieving the body unsafe. But he’s a maverick detective who does things his own way, danger be damned, and he rappels down to inspect the body before it’s moved. They’re both dangling in midair. It’s a striking opening sequence. It’s the kind of unique, attention-grabbing scene that makes people keep watching. It’s fun and pulpy and a little outrageous. Unfortunately, the rest of the show doesn’t live up to it.

Untamed is created by Mark L. Smith — his second Netflix Western limited series of the year, after American Primeval — and Elle Smith. They write a lot of cliches and clunky stuff into the scripts. Kyle is a stock troubled detective haunted by his past. He’s standoffish with everyone, he drinks too much, he’s still hung up on his ex-wife. But he’s an excellent investigator and he’s dealing with some personal stuff, and so his boss Sam Neill does his best to protect him. Kyle’s exactly what you’d expect. A cliched character in writing can be forgiven if the actor excavates something interesting about them in their performance, but Bana doesn’t quite have the ability to elevate mediocre writing. (I wonder if this is part of why he never became a top-tier movie star.) He doesn’t have the intensity to sell his descent into Rust Cohle-style madness. A show can overcome a deficiency in writing or acting, but not both.

This weakness extends to other characters, too. Kyle has a Native American friend played by Raoul Max Trujillo whose every line somehow relates to being Native American, while Kyle’s partner Naya Vasquez, played by Lily Santiago, isn’t a caricature as much as not a type of person who exists at all. She’s a young ranger who left being a beat cop in Los Angeles for a fresh start in the park, which she doesn’t seem to know anything about. She probably had to buy overpriced snow chains from a convenience store because she didn’t know she needed them. She’s nosy, sarcastic, defiant, and generally overly familiar with Kyle in a way that feels poorly considered. If a rookie is going to be disrespectful to a senior officer she doesn’t even know, there has to be a more compelling reason for why she’s behaving in such an unusual way than “she’s quirky, I guess.”

I evaluate shows based on how well they do what I believe they’re trying to do. Untamed is an unsuccessful show not because it’s more cheaply made than comparable shows, but because it’s trying to be something that it’s not. It’s a B-tier show that wants to be an A-tier show. With its invocations of suicidal grief, child abuse, and sinister conspiracies, it aspires to the seriousness of something like True Detective, but its inferior craft calls attention to how it’s not at that level at every turn (I will give Untamed credit for convincingly making British Columbia look like Yosemite, though some actors do let an “aboot” or a “mummy” slip). The writing has a sketchy quality, like the producers didn’t have the time and money to revise a rough “something like this, but better” draft and just shot what they had. The bright, gold tones of the show’s color palette signify light drama, so it’s visually discordant with the noirish themes. It doesn’t have enough characters to avoid telegraphing what the outcome of the mystery will be. It’s just not fun to watch.

Untamed would have done better to embrace being a B-tier show. It’s a fun premise that it could have gotten nuttier with. There could have been a lot more pulpy scenes like the opening rock-climbing one. Instead of having a close call with a bear, Kyle and Naya could have actually fought a bear (maybe Mark L. Smith, who co-wrote The Revenant, didn’t want to repeat himself). Sam Neill could have gone full maniac like we know he’s capable of from B-movie classic Event Horizon. Untamed fights against its limitations rather than turning them into strengths. If you don't have the resources of True Detective, why not try to be more purely entertaining than True Detective? If a B show isn’t fun, what’s the point?