You will never get lost watching The Abandons.

True, Netflix’s new Western series throws a lot of characters at you in its first few minutes.

There’s Constance (Gillian Anderson), the steely widowed matriarch of the Van Nesses, a rich mining family in the Washington Territory of the 1850s. She’s got two obnoxiously entitled sons, Willem (Toby Hemingway) and Garret (Lucas Till) and a pretty, sensitive daughter Trisha (Aisling Franciosi). The wealth of the Van Ness mines ensures that she’s got the town’s mayor (Patton Oswalt(!)) and sheriff (Marc Menchaca) under her thumb, and she’s got a pair of enforcers to do her dirty work (Michael Greyeyes, Michiel Huisman).

Which turns out to be important, because those mines are running dry, and Constance has her eye on a patch of real estate owned by poor cattle-rancher Fiona (Lena Headey), another steely matriarch. Fiona heads up her own found family of misfits on a ranch called The Abandons, including the headstrong Dahlia (Diana Silvers), the wary Lilla Belle (Natalia del Riego) and the sweet, doe-eyed Elias (Nick Robinson). Toss into the mix some fellow settlers (Lamar Johnson, Ryan Hurst, and a handful of others) and you got yourself a teeming ensemble of players.

This being the Old West, more than one of the above-mentioned characters don’t make it through the first couple episodes. But the rest get enough screentime to progress through their own storylines, their own tiny, bespoke narrative arcs, over the course of the show’s seven-episode season. (Constance’s daughter and Fiona’s son, for example, waste little time getting their stars crossed, because of course they do.) The series also teems with various factions vying for power — bandits and Native Americans and townsfolk and the military — each with its own competing motivation.

That is all, admittedly, a whole lot to keep track of, so you’d be forgiven for worrying that you might need to hie your butt online to find a wiki that’ll help keep you oriented from scene to scene, episode to episode.

But this is 2025, and streamers like Netflix are reportedly concerned about you being on your phone while watching their content, so they’ve put certain protocols in place.

How else to explain why the characters on The Abandons can be counted upon to say — to announce, really — exactly what’s on their mind, in its entirety, the very moment it occurs to them? Sometimes they repeat themselves for good measure. So adjust your expectations: If you go into The Abandons knowing that things like subtext, unvoiced implications and nuance won’t be showing up, you’ll never miss them.

Aisling Franciosi, left, as Trisha Van Ness, Gillian Anderson as Constance Van Ness and Lucas Till as Garret Van Ness in The Abandons.

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You might be watching an episode and notice a character telling another character what’s about to happen, right before it dutifully happens. Afterwards — count on it — a character will get a moment to describe everything that you just watched happen. (The Abandons is not remotely unique, by the way; once you get attuned to it you’ll start to notice it happening, to a greater or lesser extent, on most series that are currently streaming.)

Presumably that’s the nervous nellies at Netflix (and other networks) instructing their writers rooms to hold your hand and walk you through their episodic content. Yes, it’s annoying, but it helps to clarify something about The Abandons in particular.

On the surface it’s a gorgeous, hardscrabble Western, awash in stark landscapes, grubby faces, bar fights and banditry. But that’s window-dressing. Scratch away the grime with a fingernail, and you expose the pure, glitzy soap opera beneath. Oh, sure, it looks tough, brutal, merciless, dad-coded, like American Primeval. But at heart?

It’s Dynasty.

Consider: The Abandons is only an ensemble on paper; in execution, it’s a show about Anderson and Headey’s icy, powerful, hard-hearted women, Constance and Fiona. Constance wants Fiona’s land, Fiona refuses to sell. This sets off an escalating series of events that give Anderson and Headey plenty of opportunities to share the screen, trading venomous barbs and unleashing thinly veiled threats at each other, while members of their respective families, in varying combinations, clash (and smash).

There’s intrigue, betrayal, revenge and plenty of petty schemes. Buried secrets come to light, as they must. And while I would never spoil the scene in which the season-long rivalry between Constance and Fiona reaches its inevitable climax, I’ll just note that the only thing missing from it is a lily pond.

This soapiness, I hasten to note, is not a bad thing — it’s good. It’s fun. Headey is terrific as a woman who does bad things for what she only barely manages to convince herself are good reasons, and Anderson is giving Iron Lady badassery (literally — she’s busting out her throaty Maggie Thatcher whisper from The Crown, minus the plummy vowels). Her Constance does bad things too, mostly because well … she’s a bad person. Remember what I said above, about nuance, comma, the utter lack of? Yeah.

The show dutifully provides her motivations to do the nasty things she does, but those motivations are rooted in greed and hatred. The story of The Abandons is a series of black-and-white conflicts unfolding in a stark, Manichean universe. In Fiona we get a flawed hero, in Constance, a hiss-worthy villain.

Which would seem to suggest, of course, a classic Good-defeats-Evil ending, but that’s not what we get here. In fact, we get no kind of ending at all. The seventh and final episode ends on a cliffhanger.

That said, it’s all but impossible to begrudge that lack of resolution, because the episode preceding it is constructed with such care and confidence. The tension ratchets up, scene by scene, in a way that feels clean, assured and ruthlessly efficient. It just works.

And so does The Abandons, kind of — as long as you’re okay with getting some suds in your saddle.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Bryan Kohberger
I’m Not The Christmas Grinch …
Call Me The Cookie Monster!!!

Published December 6, 2025 1:00 AM PST

“I love the relationship with the clients,” said architect Frank Gehry. In Bilbao, Spain, where he designed the groundbreaking building for the Guggenheim museum, “people come out and hug me,” he said.

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“I love the relationship with the clients,” said architect Frank Gehry. In Bilbao, Spain, where he designed the groundbreaking building for the Guggenheim museum, “people come out and hug me,” he said.

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Swooping, swirling, gleaming, sculpted — Frank Gehry made buildings we’d never seen before. The architect behind the Guggenheim Museum in Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles transformed contemporary architecture. He died Friday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., after a brief respiratory illness, according to his chief of staff. He was 96.

Gehry won all the top awards — including the Pritzker Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1999, when the American Institute of Architects gave him their Gold Medal, Gehry looked out at an audience that included contemporary gods of building — Philip Johnson, Robert Venturi, Michael Graves — and said, “it’s like finding out my big brothers love me after all.”

“He was probably the only truly great artist I’ve ever encountered who desperately cared what people thought of him and that people loved his work,” says Gehry’s biographer Paul Goldberger. The architect got his share of criticism — “accusations that he made crazy shapes and paid no attention to budget.”

But the praise was louder, because his striking buildings made people happy.

With 12 huge glass “sails,” the Louis Vuitton Foundation takes the form of a sailboat among the trees of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

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With 12 huge glass “sails,” the Louis Vuitton Foundation takes the form of a sailboat among the trees of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

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A woman walks inside the Louis Vuitton Foundation in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

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A woman walks inside the Louis Vuitton Foundation in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

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“I’ve always been for optimism and architecture not being sad,” Gehry told NPR in 2004. “You know, a building for music and performance should be joyful. It should be a great experience and it should be fun to go to.”

There was exuberance in his work. The swoops and swirls — made possible with aerospace technology — lifted the spirits of viewers used to post-war modernism — strict, boxy glass and steel buildings that looked imposing and unwelcoming.

Gehry says he found that style, cold, inhuman and lifeless. “I thought it was possible to find a way to express feeling and humanistic qualities in a building,” Gehry said. “But I wasn’t clear about it until I started experimenting, quite accidentally, with fish forms.”

He loved the shape of fish, and the way they moved. He drew them all his life, an inspiration that began in his grandmother’s bathtub in Toronto.

Gehry stands next his fish lamps at his exhibition at the Gagosian Mayfair gallery, in central London, in November 2013. As a child, Gehry remembers watching carp — destined to be dinner — swimming in his grandmother’s bathtub.

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Gehry stands next his fish lamps at his exhibition at the Gagosian Mayfair gallery, in central London, in November 2013. As a child, Gehry remembers watching carp — destined to be dinner — swimming in his grandmother’s bathtub.

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“Every Thursday when I stayed at her house, I’d go with her to the market,” he recalled. “And there would be a big bag of some kind filled with water that we would carry home with a big carp in it. We’d put it in the bathtub. I’d sit and watch it and the next day it was gone.”

Those carp were turned into gefilte fish — a classic Jewish dish — but stayed in Gehry’s memory long past suppertime. He translated their curves and motions into architecture. In Prague, Czechs call his elegant design for an office building “Fred and Ginger” — two cylindrical towers, one solid, the other glass, pinched in at the waist, like dancers. His Disney Hall and his Guggenheim museum swell like symphonies.

Gehry’s whimsical towers in Prague have earned the nickname “Fred and Ginger.”

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Gehry’s whimsical towers in Prague have earned the nickname “Fred and Ginger.”

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“He really wanted you to feel a sense of movement,” Goldberger says. “A building is a static thing, but if it feels like it’s moving, for him that was more exciting.”

The Guggenheim — a billowing swirl of titanium in gold and sunset colors — excited viewers. After it opened in 1997, Gehry said everyone who came to him wanted a Guggeinheim. But Gehry wasn’t interested.

“Like all great artists, he wanted to keep pushing himself and move forward,” Goldberger says. “He did not want to copy himself. He did not want to do that building again.”

The Guggeinheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and The Disney Hall in Los Angeles (it opened in 2003, a swoosh of silver stainless steel, 1/16th of an inch thick) are Gehry’s signature buildings. But they’re a far cry from his early work. His own 1978 residence in Santa Monica sports common materials. If clients couldn’t afford fancy — marble, say — he’d use cheap.

Gehry constructed the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles out of stainless steel. “We’re living in a culture, in a time where movement is pervasive,” he said. “Everything is moving. And so if we hook onto that and use it as part of our language, our architectural language, there’s some resonance for it.”

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Gehry constructed the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles out of stainless steel. “We’re living in a culture, in a time where movement is pervasive,” he said. “Everything is moving. And so if we hook onto that and use it as part of our language, our architectural language, there’s some resonance for it.”

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Inside the Disney Concert Hall.

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Inside the Disney Concert Hall.

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“He started using plywood and chain link fence and corrugated metal,” Goldberger says.

Those buildings got attention. But the later ones made him a star — and a term was coined: Starchitect. Goldberger says Gehry hated it.

“He didn’t really hate fame,” Goldberger explains. “But he was too smart to sacrifice everything for it.”

Gehry kept faithful to his vision. He turned down jobs that didn’t feel right and imagined others that got built, were widely admired, but sometimes didn’t live up to his imagination.

“You know, what’s in my mind’s eye is always 10 times better than what I ever achieve because the dream image can leak …” Gehry said with a laugh. “But in terms of its public acceptance it’s beyond anything I ever expected. I’ve never been accepted before like this.”

Gehry received a National Medal of Arts from Bill Clinton and a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama. The New Yorker called Bilbao “a masterpiece of the 20th century.” Architect Philip Johnson said it was “the building of the century.” And the public (with some exceptions, of course) adored the work.

“He made great architecture accessible to people,” Goldberger says, and that re-shaped their sense of what buildings could be.

He describes Gehry’s work as “one of those extraordinary moments where the most advanced art intersects with popular taste. That only happens very rarely in the culture, in any field.”

It’s been said that architecture is the message a civilization sends to the future. With walls that are shaped and sculpted, and buildings that look joyous and free, Frank Gehry’s is a message of humanism and hope.

The author of this obituary, Susan Stamberg, died in October 2025. The story was updated and reviewed before publication.

Shannon Rhoades edited the audio of this story. Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.