Meanwhile, the nonbinary actor Jesse James Keitel brings grace, intelligence and self-awareness to a history-making role-but their character Jerrie is a sex worker whose anatomy becomes a plot point early in the season, despite years of pushback from trans and gender-nonconforming actors about roles that fetishize their bodies. The misogyny they’re battling is so over-the-top as to feel goofy rather than menacing. There is a current of vague, girl-power feminism running through this story, which sends female investigators on a search for two teen-girl kidnapping victims endowed with far more agency than the typical crime-drama dead girl. While it’s true that its themes are fairly progressive by the retrograde standards of network television, Big Sky nonetheless feels years behind the cultural conversation. Rick (the wonderful John Carroll Lynch) is a folksy state trooper whose wife (Brooke Smith of Grey’s Anatomy) won’t stop complaining about menopause. Truck driver Ronald (Brian Geraghty of NBC’s Chicago franchise) lives with his nagging mom (a reliably over-the-top Valerie Mahaffey). Cassie (Kylie Bunbury, a star in search of a vehicle since her charismatic turn in Fox’s frustratingly short-lived Pitch) and Cody ( Ryan Phillippe) are private detectives turned lovers-a relationship that doesn’t exactly delight Cody’s estranged wife Jenny ( Vikings star Katheryn Winnick). Throughout the premiere, we meet other rural types whose ties to the crime take a while to tease out. Suffice to say that the plot revs up with the kidnapping of two teenage sisters, Danielle ( The Gifted’s Natalie Alyn Lind) and Grace (Jade Pettyjohn of Little Fires Everywhere, an early standout), on a road-trip to visit Danielle’s boyfriend. All you can really ask of this kind of series is that it’s entertaining, and in that respect Big Sky delivers.īecause so much of that entertainment comes from the ridiculously frequent twists, it would be cruel to give away anything major. And for all its crisp, immersive cinematography and timely themes, it still feels more like a network potboiler than a groundbreaking work of art. (To be fair, neither does 99.999% of content released by cable channels or streaming services.) It’s far more visceral than cerebral. The show doesn’t come close to equaling David Lynch’s sui generis philosophical murder soap. It opens with a montage of natural beauty straight out of the Twin Peaks (which had its original two-season run on ABC) credits sequence-snow-capped mountains, dramatic waterfalls, evergreen forests-before opening in the familiar environs of a frozen-in-time diner called the Dirty Spoon. As its title suggests, the show is set in Montana. And it’s not shy about inviting comparisons to classics. Kelley, who was known for broadcast blockbusters like Chicago Hope and Ally McBeal before he was known for Big Little Lies. Box, it’s a lightning-paced crime story from the sought-after creator David E. 17, as precisely that: a polished, sophisticated, boundary-pushing prestige thriller of the kind that major networks almost never make anymore. Still, every once in a while (though increasingly rarely of late) a broadcaster will resist the mandate to churn out nothing but cost-effective primetime procedurals and set to work on something more ambitious.ĪBC is marketing Big Sky, which premieres on Nov. As a rule, pay TV offers bigger budgets, more creative freedom, more leeway to explore adult themes and more flexibility in season and episode length. Broadcast networks will never be able to compete with cable or streaming when it comes to top-shelf dramas.
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