The smallest story Taylor Sheridan has ever told, and the one that stuck with me the longest.
I’ve watched nearly everything Sheridan has put on Paramount+. Yellowstone, 1883, 1923, Landman, Tulsa King. Those shows run on big stakes: a ranch the size of a small state, oil leases, cartel money, somebody getting a one-way ride to the train station. The Madison has none of that. Nobody fights over land. Nobody gets shot. The entire first season follows one family through the days between a death and a funeral, and it’s the best thing he’s made.
Michelle Pfeiffer plays Stacy Clyburn, a Manhattan woman married to Preston (Kurt Russell), a man who loves Montana far more than she ever has. In the first episode Preston stretches a fishing trip with his brother Paul (Matthew Fox) by one more day, a storm moves in, and the small plane Paul is flying goes down with both of them aboard. Stacy, her daughters Abby (Beau Garrett) and Paige (Elle Chapman), and the rest of the family fly out to the Madison River valley to identify the bodies and figure out what comes next.
That’s the whole show. Six episodes, every one written by Sheridan and directed by Christina Voros, and it never reaches for anything bigger.
Small on Purpose
Every Sheridan show I can think of is about people protecting something they own. Here the only thing at stake is whether Stacy can get out of bed. That shift changes how the show moves. Voros keeps the camera close and lets scenes sit in silence longer than any other Sheridan series would allow. Montana still looks incredible, but it reads as the place Preston loved instead of a kingdom someone has to defend.
The scene that got me comes midway through the season. Stacy walks into the third cabin on the property and slowly realizes Preston built it decades ago for their daughters, who never came out to use it. Old stuffed animals are still sitting there. You figure it out a few seconds before she does, and those seconds are brutal. Yellowstone would have spent that time on a shootout. The Madison spends it on a woman standing in a doorway.
The funeral episodes work the same way. Cade, the neighbor, and Van, the local sheriff, dig the graves by hand. The service on the hillside is short and windy and nobody quite knows what to say. If you’ve ever helped plan a funeral, you’ll recognize all of it: the family fights at the worst possible moment, and the in-law nobody pays attention to ends up carrying the whole thing. Here that’s Patrick J. Adams as Paige’s husband Russell, who handles everything and never asks for credit. It’s a quiet, generous performance, and I didn’t expect it to be one of my favorite parts of the season.
Michelle Pfeiffer Carries It
This is Pfeiffer’s show, and she’s phenomenal. Stacy is not easy to like at first. She’s sharp, a little snobby about Montana, and she keeps the people trying to help her at arm’s length. Pfeiffer never asks you to feel sorry for her, which is exactly why you do.
The fourth episode has the family listening to the recording from the plane. Preston’s last word is her name. Pfeiffer doesn’t play it big. She just goes somewhere far away while sitting in a chair, and it’s the hardest the show hits.
Will Arnett shows up in the back half as the therapist Stacy starts seeing once she’s back in New York. I did not see that casting coming, and their scenes together are some of the best in the season. He’s low-key and patient, and he gives Pfeiffer someone to push against who doesn’t push back.
Kurt Russell fans should know he’s mostly an absence. Russell wasn’t cast until after Pfeiffer had already shot her side of season one, so his scenes were filmed a year later. You can feel the seam once or twice, but since the show is about a family living with the hole Preston left, it mostly works in the show’s favor.
Where It Wobbles
Sheridan can’t help himself with the New York versus Montana stuff. The city is almost always shown as cold and fake and Montana as honest, and a few of those jabs land like cheap shots. Paige gets the thinnest material of the main cast, even with a memorable moment where she punches a co-worker and gets fired. The romance between Abby and Van never clicked for me, and their breakup in episode five didn’t hit the way the show wanted it to.
None of that dragged it down much. The things the show cares about, it gets right.
The Ending (Spoilers)
The finale ends at a memorial in the family’s New York apartment. Stacy walks out without saying a word to anyone, charters a flight back to Montana, and leaves her phone behind. Her family has no idea where she is. The last thing we see is her waking up next to Preston’s grave. There’s no speech explaining what she’s decided. She went home to him, and the show trusts you to get that.
Paramount+ has already confirmed seasons two and three, with Pfeiffer and Russell both back, though Matthew Fox won’t return. Russell should be around a lot more now that his scenes aren’t being shot a year late. I just hope Sheridan keeps it this small, because a quiet show about a woman learning to live in her husband’s favorite place turned out to be the thing he was best at all along.
Sources: Taste of Country | The Hollywood Reporter | JoBlo | TV Insider
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