Even Michelle Pfeiffer Can't Save 'The Madison'

The new Taylor Sheridan series on Paramount+ turns its female characters into caricatures.

Taylor Sheridan shows tend to be about cultural specters, the ghosts that fill a past, a place, a business, a legacy. In the case of “The Madison,” his new six-episode series for Paramount+, the specter is literal. The show is about a family’s grief after an unexpected loss.

That grief spans two settings: Manhattan and the Madison River Valley. In New York, the Madison is an avenue for luxury shopping, a stereotype of everything that is wrong with urban elitism (read: liberalism). In Montana, the Madison is a sun-dappled, trout-filled river that snakes through the mountainous landscape, symbolizing the greater meaning and purpose that is found in experiencing a natural place (read: traditionalism).

While this culture-war dichotomy and moralizing will feel familiar to fans of Sheridan’s shows, the problem in “The Madison” is its lazy overtness and how it overlaps with its female characters to turn them into caricatures and shortchange their stories.

In the show, New York City exists solely as a superficial trope, and this one-dimensional representation makes it impossible for the city storylines to counterbalance the Montana ones effectively. This is problematic because, unlike other Sheridan shows, “The Madison” centers mostly around the women in a family. Because these women are reduced to the ways they embody the stereotypical portrayal of the city from which they are from, they lack the complexity needed to hold the center of the show, and the plot is uneven as it vacillates between the two locations to tell their story.

This problem is clear from the beginning. The pilot episode opens with the family’s exorbitantly wealthy patriarch, Preston Clyburn (Kurt Russell), fly-fishing with his brother Paul (Matthew Fox). Preston isn’t catching any fish. The issue, his younger brother tells him, is his wrist. There’s too much action.