In Netflix’s ‘Ransom Canyon,’ handsome men, horses and high drama run free
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Now streaming on Netflix, the home of “Virgin River” (six seasons, seventh on the way), is “Ransom Canyon.” Like “Virgin River,” it adapts the work of a bestselling romance novelist — Jodi Thomas, who sets her books in her home state of Texas — putting pretty people against a magnificent landscape and complicating their lives with love, hate, calamity and a little sex. Feels like a sure bet, in other words.
As in most every such show, there is at its center a couple — quantum entangled, their spooky action expressed sometimes at a distance, sometimes clinch-close. But wherever the story leads them, wherever else their attention turns, however long it takes them to get together in the first place, it’s a given they’ll find their way to or back to each other, at least until one of them leaves the show. I’m not delivering a spoiler here; it’s in the manual.
In my mind “Ransom Canyon,” developed by April Blair (“Jane by Design”), keeps coming out “Handsome Canyon,” and no one here is handsomer than Staten Kirkland (Josh Duhamel), a big-time rancher with moody hair and a peppery beard. His cosmically intended partner, if he would only admit it, is Quinn O’Grady (Minka Kelly), once a classical pianist of great note — “Leonard’s adamant about doing Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and, you, my dear are the only pianist I’ve heard to do it justice,” says her manager (Kate Hudson), trying to coax her back to Manhattan — though we’ll hear nothing more from her than a few pensive arpeggios.
Walking away from her keyboard career like Jack Nicholson in “Five Easy Pieces,” Quinn hied home from New York when Staten’s wife, her best friend, took ill; she stuck around after she died, then stuck around after Staten’s son died in a car crash. Waiting for Staten to lift his head from mourning and see her for the catch she is, she farms lavender and runs a bar — excuse me, a “dance hall” — with bartender Ellie (Marianly Tejada). As can happen in fiction and in life, Staten’s brother-in-law, Davis (Eoin Macken), has been carrying his own torch for Quinn; though a man of ulterior motives, he does seem sincere in this, which makes trouble all the more likely, and sad.
Davis’ bellicose football hero son, Reid (Andrew Liner), has just been dumped by sad-eyed cheerleader Lauren (Lizzy Greene), daughter of the sheriff Dan Brigman (Philip Winchester) and occasionally recovering alcoholic mother Margaret (Sarah Minnich). Her new squeeze is Lucas (Garrett Wareing), sensitive and blond and essentially an orphan — dad has gone off — and tied to his troublesome brother, Kit (Casey W. Johnson).
This is all just setting the stage. You have guessed by now that this is a show full of confrontation and secrets and characters generally out of sorts; any happy interlude is liable to lead to an argument, any gathering to a fistfight or someone who should know better shooting their mouth off. I had to keep writing down names and connections to keep everyone straight — who was whose son or grandson, etc. It seemed at times they all were one family. For a while I thought that one character and her sister were the same person.
Meanwhile, a company called Austin Water & Power wants to run a pipeline into Ransom Canyon’s ginormous aquifer. It has been tossing money around like confetti but has come upon a pair of immovable objects in the persons of cantankerous old rancher Cap Fuller (James Brolin), to whom the thing just smells bad (he has a dead son too), and Staten, who wants nothing to come between him and his “60,000 acres of unspoiled Texas grassland” and the 30,000 head of cattle that graze upon it. (We are shown a representative few.)
“The world’s drying up,” Staten says. “That aquifer feeds wells, our crops and our cattle, and I’m not going to let them run it dry.”
Into this cozy community comes darkly handsome Yancy Grey (Jack Schumacher), possibly dangerous Yancy Grey — it’s a dangerous name, anyway — who reads poetry and slides into a job with Cap and a flirtation with Ellie. Eventually, after she sews up his cut hand — she was a nurse before she worked a bar, and aren’t they kind of the same thing? — he will explain his scars, like Indy to Marion at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” There is a certain type of character in such stories whom love will improve, and you can see in his eyes he might be one.
There is no reason on Earth not to enjoy this well-made, nicely acted, soapy, soap-bubble show, whose 10 episodes have been laid out whole for you to binge. Come for the messy lives, the promise of love, the old-fashioned values. Come for the hats, the boots, the horses, the ruggedness once used to sell cigarettes. Stay for the country music cameo. It’s not everywhere you’ll hear a line like “Tell the boys to saddle up.” But you’ll hear it here.
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