Just for fun. IMDB gives it a 7.4 Having watched it, I've given it a score of 5.9.
Onscreen, at least, there are enough rangers to keep Yosemite running and to investigate a mysterious death at El Capitan.
In the category of “Shows That Play Differently Under the Current Administration,” this week brings “Untamed,” a new Netflix mystery mini-series set in Yosemite National Park.
On one hand, you can’t help wondering whether all those rangers would have time to investigate a mysterious death on the face of El Capitan when the National Park Service has lost nearly 25 percent of its permanent staff since President Trump took office again. Aren’t there restrooms that need cleaning?
On the other, hiring rangers who look like Eric Bana and Lily Santiago — who play the primary investigators of that mysterious death — might be explained as part of the recent “Make America Beautiful Again” executive order.
Bana, 20 years along from his action-star heyday (when he appeared successively in “Hulk,” “Troy” and “Munich”), plays Kyle Turner, who is not just any ranger. He’s an agent of the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch, so he’s sort of a federal cousin to the naval investigators at “NCIS.” Maybe CBS would have gone ahead and called the show “NPSISB,” but Netflix, cautious by nature, has gone with “Untamed.”
The title refers both to the landscape — mountainous British Columbia locations stand in for California — and to Turner, a laconic loner with a tragic back story and an entire Douglas fir’s worth of chips on his shoulder. Even his horse thinks he’s too intense.
With Bana playing a modern lawman hemmed in by bureaucracy and fueled by guilt and resentment, “Untamed” sits between neo-frontier soap opera (like “Yellowstone”) and neo-western crime drama (like “Dark Winds” or the late, lamented “Longmire”). Mark L. Smith, who created the show with his daughter Elle Smith, has experience in this region of the American imagination, having played up the brutal aspects of the western mythos as a co-writer of “The Revenant” and creator of an earlier Netflix mini-series, “American Primeval.”
This time he’s working with an executive producer, John Wells, who has a track record in polished TV drama like “ER” and “The Pitt.” And the show they have come up with feels like a hybrid: a network-style procedural grafted onto a short-run streaming drama, the crime-solving formulas overlapping with the psychological-melodrama formulas.
So Turner mopes and seethes while methodically looking into what caused an unidentified young woman to take a header from the top of El Capitan (a scene that gets the series off to a deceptively high-adrenaline start). He is stonily uncommunicative with the new ranger, Naya Vasquez (played by Santiago), a former Los Angeles cop whose unfamiliarity with the outdoors provides a current of comic relief.
It’s conventional stuff, but Bana and Santiago play off each other reasonably well, and the mystery (which ends up, as so many mysteries do these days, as a cri de coeur about neglected children) is a little more rigorously worked out than the Netflix norm.
Sam Neill, as the park’s chief ranger, and Raoul Max Trujillo, as an Indigenous park worker and magical Miwok who dispenses wisdom to Turner, provide gruff presence, while Rosemarie DeWitt is better than the material demands as Turner’s ex.
And it’s nice to think that the bad publicity surrounding an unsolved death might be the biggest problem facing Yosemite at the moment.
‘Untamed’ Review: A National Park Procedural From Netflix
Greg