After a brief blip where Fallout was no longer the most watched offering on Amazon Prime Video, unseated by Anne Hathaway’s movie, the Idea of You, now an actual TV show has come along to dethrone it.
That would be the return of Outer Range for season 2, the deeply strange sci-fi western starring Josh Brolin that just returned this week, where he plays a rancher that discovers a giant, unexplainable hole on his property. The show first debuted in April of 2022, and like every show these days it seems, it took two years for it to return for a second season. A show in a similar vein, Night Sky, was cancelled on Amazon, but Outer Range survived and has returned for even more weirdness.
For now, season 2 is reviewing better than season 1, an 88% critic score to 79%. Audience scores for season 1 were a decently dismal 61%, but they’re already in the 80s with a few dozen in for the new seasons. In short, it looks like improvement.
I hope it is, anyway. While the show made me curious enough to watch the entire season, I came away not liking it all that much with its odd concept and frequent plot holes. There were also really predictable twists saved for not-so-shocking reveals by the end, and I didn’t really think it all worked. I don’t know if I’m going to try season 2 as a result.
Fallout, meanwhile, continues it domination, and the fact that we’re still talking about it recently being #1 on Amazon well over a month after its debut is really all you need to know about it. It set Nielsen ratings for back-to-back weeks with a billion minutes watched, and this is a show you could binge all at once, on top of that. Season 2 is coming, obviously.
As for the future of Outer Range, that may depend on how this season goes, but debuting at #1 isn’t bad, certainly, given both what it’s replacing and the fact that this isn’t exactly Amazon’s highest profile series.
There is already talk about season 3 regardless. Here’s Josh Brolin on the idea, speaking to Variety:
“The idea of a Season 3 is very intriguing and not something I would necessarily, in most cases, look forward to,” he says. “Wanting to carry a character that far for that long, even the idea of doing a play for two years just sounds awful to me. You want to get in there, 12 weeks of work, have your impact, hope it is good and get out. I think that is much more my mentality, and it is why I got out of TV in the first place…But this is different. This has its hook in me. I don’t know exactly why. I don’t think any of us does.”
For a film actor like Josh Brolin who hates sticking around for long projects to be that into the idea of multiple years of this does say something, and I will admit his turn as Royal is an interesting one. We’ll see how season 2 does and if Amazon extracts a third from it as a result.
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
