What to stream this week: Gillian Anderson’s western, plus five more picks

Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey go head-to-head in the western The Abandons, documentary Predators looks at the history of controversial reality show, while The Beatles: Anthology gets an update.

The Abandons ★★ (Netflix)

More driftwood than Deadwood, this western manages to squander the significant star power of its two leads: Gillian Anderson (The X-Files) and Lena Headey (Game of Thrones). As frontier rivals from different worlds who ultimately share a never-back-down fanaticism, the pair play characters hemmed in by uncertain storytelling and awkward execution.

The show isn’t sure whether it’s updating the western or celebrating the genre’s timeless tenets. The Abandons settles for a jack-of-all-trades approach, which means it masters none.

From the first scene, set around the fictional town of Angel’s Ridge in America’s then-Washington Territory in 1854, wealthy matriarch Constance Van Ness (Anderson) is resorting to sabotage to drive out a handful of farming families, led by scrappy Irish widow Fiona Nolan (Headey) and her adopted children, whose land she needs to save her faltering silver mining company.

It’s an undeclared war, fought at night with harsh glares by day. When it gets personal, a heinous crime from both sides makes the business bloodily personal.

The Abandons was created by Kurt Sutter, who previously oversaw the outlaw motorcycle gang saga Sons of Anarchy. The horsepower is different, but the philosophy is similar: the characters ride from one meeting to another, making alliances and starting fights. Constance dallies with armed robbers and defiant members of the verdant landscape’s Native American Cayuse tribe, but there’s little sense of economics, logistics, or community. It’s not clear how Angel’s Ridge operates, so the townsfolk mostly stay as outlines.

Sutter didn’t finish the show, as he left the production near the end of shooting after Netflix reportedly watched rough cuts of the initial episodes. The subsequent patch-up work and edits are readily apparent, whether it’s the tonal shift between episode one and two, or storylines being started but barely developed.

Most worrying is how certain scenes resort to one of Netflix’s worst habits: having a character say aloud what is readily apparent, to help along viewers distracted by a second screen.

The result is competent but uninspiring. In their respective close-ups, Anderson gives Constance a furious restraint, while Headey leans into Fiona’s pious defiance. Unfortunately, the writing doesn’t find a way for either way to genuinely articulate what motivates them.

It’s a welcome update to make the protagonists of this western female, but it’s still familiar if they end up repeating the arcs of their male predecessors.

One brief shot fascinated me – a frontier teenager’s bedroom – but The Abandons struggles to rise above violent pastiche. To be as obvious as the narrative hand-holding, it’s a misfire.

Predators ★★★★ (Paramount+)

Airing in America between 2004 and 2007 as a segment on the news-magazine show Dateline NBC, To Catch a Predator was a hidden-camera sting that used adult decoys posing as minors, on the telephone and briefly in person, to attract men to a house for what they believed would be sexual encounters. Instead, they were confronted by reporter Chris Hansen and then arrested by local police. “What you’re seeing,” notes Cambridge University professor Mark de Rond, as he watches an episode, “is effectively someone’s life end.”

Directed with a piercing clarity, and eventually a painful degree of self-revelation, by David Osit, this feature-length documentary examines the concept on multiple levels. It details the ethical issues, including entrapment, that shadowed it from the beginning, and looks at how Hansen – an unrepentant contemporary interview subject – humiliating the culprits was a warped combination of vigilantism and entertainment. The tragedy that ended To Catch a Predator, which NBC somehow partly aired, was probably inevitable.

Everyone that came to the various stings was already guilty due to their prior illegal communications, but the show profited from dehumanising the men. That’s a salient lesson for today’s society, where To Catch a Predator remains influential on YouTube and in conspiracy theories. Osit’s illuminating documentary doesn’t lecture; instead it’s saddened by a succession of failings that have no easy answers.

Wild Cherry ★★★ (HBO Max)

This British thriller about the fallout between two families in an exclusive British gated community – which starts with the teenage daughters and swiftly engulfs their mothers, best friends Lorna (Carmen Ejogo) and Juliet (Eve Best) – wants to have its cake and it too. The behaviour of the teenage girls who imagine themselves as sexualised commodities and star influencers goes for shock and awe, but it’s matched by wide-ranging observations on class, friendship, and online privilege. It works better as a wild, trashy ride than a thoughtful critique, but it’s always nice to have a choice.

The Beatles: Anthology ★★★½ (Disney+)

Three decades after its debut was a major television event, this documentary series about the band that changed the course of popular music has been remastered for the streaming era. The songs have an absolute power, as the existing eight episodes tell the go-to-whoa tale of Liverpool lads turned icons John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, while an extra instalment showing the then-surviving members working on Anthology in the mid-1990s. It lacks the specificity of Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary series, but it’s still a terrific primer.

Dispatches from Elsewhere ★★★ (Netflix)

In between How I Met Your Mother concluding and Shrinking debuting, Jason Segel created and starred in this idiosyncratic puzzle-box of a series, which lasted for one little-seen 2020 season. Now getting the Netflix megaphone, Dispatches from Elsewhere follows a quartet of dissatisfied strangers in Philadelphia – Segel, Sally Field, Andre Benjamin and Eve Lindley – drawn together by a mysterious open-world game each interprets differently. There are puzzles, genre leaps, and Richard E. Grant as the menacing facilitator. It’s ambitious and flawed, but there’s also empathy and originality. In 2025, that’s worth reconsidering.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ★★★½ (Amazon Prime Video)

My television nightcap every evening this last week has been an episode of the 1979 BBC adaptation of John le Carre’s essential Cold War spy novel, with Alec Guinness as the gnomic former spymaster, George Smiley, recalled to search for a Soviet mole atop MI6. The budget covers essentials only, and the storytelling can be suitably cryptic, but Guinness is masterfully restrained as a conflicted spook and the lengthy sequences capture, in often venomous terms, the self-loathing and mannered vitriol that defines a failing British ruling class. Note: Amazon Prime Video also has the 1982 sequel, Smiley’s People.

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