The Son keeps AMC in the business of historic American heartland epics with sweeping moral implications.
Launching Saturday at 9 p.m. ET, The Son’s 10-episode first season digs into a family that beat so many odds it thought it could tame Texas, only to find that eventually, sometimes, your sins catch up.
Starring Pierce Brosnan (top and below) in the singularly unlikeable role of patriarch Eli McCullough, The Son follows the McCulloughs through two centuries, not always in chronological order.
The family started as settlers in the early 19th century, got rich with cattle and then in the early 20th century decided to bet on oil.
By then the one-time settlers lived in a lavish manor house nestled on a whole lot of southern Texas.
The Son resembles Dallas only in the hats. More often it echoes Giant, through a darker lens that finds a similar hardening of the hearts of men who felt they were owed payback for what they suffered back when no one thought they’d amount to anything.
Based on the best-selling Philipp Meyer novel, and with Meyer’s help in the adaptation, The Son begins in two places: the prairie of 1849 and the Texas of 1915.
In 1849, young Eli (Jacob Lofland, right) is a gentle soul who likes to fish and enjoys a relatively serene, somewhat secluded life with his settler family.
Then Comanches raid their home, doing unspeakable things to his mother and sister before killing them. They torch the house, dragging Eli and his brother away.
This is not a sympathetic bunch of Native Americans. But then, why should they be much different from anyone else in The Son? It’s a hard world.
That’s only a little less true in 1915 Texas, where Eli has become wealthy from cattle ranching and now wants to become even wealthier from oil drilling.
What Eli wants, even as he’s about to turn 80, Eli gets. He doesn’t solicit opinions and suggestions. When his son Pete (Henry Garrett, below) warns that digging oil wells takes resources from what are literally their cash cows, Eli waves him off.
Eli also moves swiftly to swat some other gnats buzzing around his head, like the rustlers who are cutting fences and stealing some of his cattle.
Pete tells him that laying off farmhands means some parts of the fence go unprotected, but Eli prefers a different kind of policing: the kind where anyone caught in his fields is subject to swift and final justice without the fuss and bother of the legal system.
This is not Pierce Brosnan’s most sympathetic role.
These main threads are woven, naturally, into a web of evolving side dramas.
Some of Eli’s moves create friction with his successful neighbors the Garcias, whose patriarch (Carlos Bardem) considers himself a fully assimilated American.
Eli only knows some Mexican activists are stealing cattle, and he sees no reason every Mexican shouldn’t be held accountable.
This brings Garcia daughter Maria (Paola Nuñez) into the game, and she turns out to be a pivotal figure for both sides.
At the same time, Eli’s cold-eyed view of the world creates an interesting counterpoint to his relationship with his young granddaughter, Jeannie (Sydney Lucas, above). They smile, hug and pick flowers while Jeannie’s father loads the body of a lynched Mexican into the back of their truck.
Think the kid might grow up with some issues?
In any case, The Son will do some explaining about how Eli got from there to here, and how other characters like Jeannie will get from here to their own there.
A lot of it is dark stuff, darker than AMC’s last Western epic Hell on Wheels, and it’s clearly plunging into serious sociological, political and historical matters.
Brosnan and his colleagues handle the acting part nicely, and AMC’s history suggests its viewers can handle somber subjects. The Son will test their ability to take a deep breath and watch one more time.