The logline for Taylor Sheridan’s latest Paramount+ series, “The Madison,” bills the show as a drama “unfolding across two distinct worlds.” Technically, that’s true as the first season splits its time between Montana and Manhattan. But only one of these places appears anything like a world. The other feels as if a straw man could be a city.
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Here’s how “The Madison” feels about New York City. In the first scene that takes place there, a white woman (Elle Chapman’s Paige McIntosh) gets punched in the face by a random Black man walking down the street. Bystanders film the incident and offer no help. When she goes to report the incident to the authorities, this sanctimonious victim cannot even bring herself to say the race of her assailant. It’s every right-wing talking point about the city dramatized in lurid detail, and the show does not get any more nuanced in its juvenile stereotyping from there. Seriously, the show would have viewers believe New Yorkers have never seen a sunset or built a snowman.
Without fail, those born and bred in the Big Apple—and their assorted coterie of high society pals—do not get to be characters any more than their home gets to be a place. These spoiled snobs are uniformly weak, ineffectual, and insensitive to the needs of others. The only thing these uptight cosmopolitans are more addicted to than their phones is enveloping others in their own navel-gazing needs. Even the two young children in the cast do not escape this characterization, becoming the butt of a multi-episode arc joke that shames them for budding wokeness.
“The Madison” reveals a pervasive double standard in contemporary media. City folk are fair game for mockery and must absorb the most offensive caricatures of their identity. It’s all but impossible, meanwhile, to imagine the same level of derision tolerated when directed toward Americans who live away from the coast. Sheridan’s writing lionizes the salt-of-the-earth Montanans with whom the central Clyburn clan comes into contact. He grants characters like the earnest rancher neighbor Cade (Kevin Zegers) and the sturdy law enforcement officer Van (Ben Schnetzer) the humanity and nuance that he refuses to extend to his Gothamite ensemble.
It’s the imbalance between the two spheres of action that dooms “The Madison” from the jump. If the series wanted to explore a series of archetypes through cartoonish exaggeration, it might sustain the garish, fish-out-of-water sitcom tone (the pathetic soyboi husband, played by Patrick J. Adams, should be the lead in that incarnation). But that over-the-top clownery clashes immediately with the sentimental style of the local population in Montana, where the Clyburn family spends some extended time dealing with unexpected developments. Director Christina Alexandra Voros proves unable to shift the vibe from a sophisticated soap opera into the territory of a mellower melodrama.
The only figure in “The Madison” even slightly capable of straddling the divide—across tones, regions, or otherwise—is Michelle Pfeiffer’s steely matriarch, Stacy Clyburn. She’s a city creature through and through, but she can flex when necessary to be a country gal. Stacy even surprises herself about how much joy and satisfaction she finds under the bright Montanan sun. She previously let her husband, Kurt Russell’s outdoorsy businessman Preston, enjoy their land like a private playground. Yet once fate intervenes and brings her into newfound contact with the Western terrain, her foundational sense of self shatters.
If there is any recommendable aspect of “The Madison,” it’s getting to watch Pfeiffer cook across six episodes. Her incandescent rage provides the only source of illumination in this tired parade of anti-elitist tropes straight out of a Fox News opinion show. The performance is good enough to make one wish Sheridan had any idea how to write material worthy of the actress. The show strands its lone seer of logic in a monotonous parade of having to correct her uptight family members, interrupted occasionally by an entertaining fit of self-righteous rage.
Michelle Pfeiffer is the only real thing in a show otherwise detached from reality. If Sheridan wanted to land a punch on New York City, he should aim at the one that actually exists rather than the boogeyman he invents for “The Madison.” It’s a shame that the star showrunner decamped for Universal, because this show meets all the criteria for the increasingly conservative slant to which Paramount owner David Ellison is bending his growing media empire. [D]
New York-based freelance journalist whose writing appears regularly on Decider, Slant, Slashfilm, and The Playlist, covering film with a focus on cultural context.
