SPOILER ALERT: The following contains spoilers for The Madison Season 1, Episode 1.

Taylor Sheridan’s latest series The Madison feels like a refreshing step back for everyone involved. The premise of the show is the Clyburn family trading in New York City high society for the wilds of Montana, in keeping with Sheridan’s neo-Western brand. But the Madison series premiere is also something simpler and quieter than Sheridan is known for, which makes it a pleasant change of pace—despite the grim subject matter.

Stacy and Preston Clyburn, their daughters Abigail and Paige, Abby’s two daughters and Paige’s husband Russell are all living the high life until Preston and his brother Paul are killed in a plane crash. The start of The Madison plays with the conventions and idiosyncracies of the city, both plot-wise and in the beautiful direction by Yellowstone and 1883 alum Christina Alexandra Voros. Voros shoots New York as big, bright and almost daunting, while characters mention brand names and stare at their cell phones. In contrast, the Madison River Valley shots are wide and with a broader array of colors. One of the early hooks of the show is this visual language that Voros builds throughout.

There’s not much plot to be had, because audiences know from early on that Sheridan is transitioning these city slickers to the country. Instead, the appeal of The Madison‘s debut is following Michelle Pfeiffer’s Stacy Clyburn. Pfeiffer is engaging from the start, and the sequence in which Stacy and her friend Liliana (Rebecca Spence) learn about the crash is phenomenally well-acted. It’s such a vehement expression of shock and grief, not just from Pfeiffer but from Spence as well. Voros wisely has the camera simply center on Pfeiffer and lets audiences soak up the emotion. Stacy is an immediately likeable character, and the pilot sees Pfeiffer take her through sharp ups and downs that make her even more compelling.

While The Madison is clearly her show, there are other actors who stand out quickly as well. Suits alum Patrick J. Adams provides a lot of comic relief as Stacy’s son-in-law Russell McIntosh, who probably never saw himself traveling to Montana ever. Russell is charmingly confused a lot of the time and Adams plays that without making him seem dumb or myopic. He’s the stand-in for the audience as they try to orient themselves to this new world Taylor Sheridan is creating. Beau Garrett also makes an impression as Abby, Stacy and Preston’s oldest daughter whose bluntness sharpens the edges of The Madison. The actors are so good that the slowness of the plot becomes less relevant.

The episode is not without its flaws, most notably how it can be heavy-handed in what Sheridan wants the audience to think or feel. Some of the lines feel like criticisms of city life and modern culture, from the initial robbery scene where no one stops to help Paige, to a later argument about whether or not mentioning someone’s race is inherently racist. As happened in Landman Season 2, Sheridan tries to make a point that he doesn’t necessarily need to.

It’s also hard to ignore that The Madison‘s pilot is, well, a pilot. The episode never gets away from the explaining that every TV show has to do, whether it’s the clear foreshadowing of Preston and Paul’s accident to dialogue sketching out every Clyburn family relationship. The clunky feel that results, however, doesn’t make the show any less compelling thanks to the aforementioned performances—particularly Pfeiffer’s. She’s the engine on which The Madison runs.

The Madison premiere is atypical in so many ways. This version of a family’s grief is at times devastating and then at times has almost sitcom levels of banter. It’s a Taylor Sheridan series that once again trumpets the beauty of the West, but it’s much quieter, slower and definitely less complicated than what fans know him for. This isn’t a great saga like Yellowstone; in fact, one wonders if the idea for The Madison perhaps came from Sheridan choosing to kill off John Dutton in Yellowstone‘s final season. The Clyburns lose their patriarch, too, but this is a more direct study of loss, with nothing else but that to think about. The intimacy and the smallness of it, despite those sweeping landscape shots, is what makes The Madison worth checking into.

The Madison streams Saturdays on Paramount+. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Paramount+.

Article content is (c)2020-2026 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.