Outer Range, review: this sci-fi Western hybrid is more cowpoke than quickdraw

America used to make Westerns. Now it makes television about the death of the Old West and the march into antiquity of the big-sky freedom and grizzled masculinity it once embodied. That obsession with American decline and fall has given Kevin Costner, among others, the mother of all second winds with his series Yellowstone, about a hard-bitten rancher trying to stay connected to the Old Ways in a fast-changing world.

Where Costner has gone, Josh Brolin is seemingly keen to follow. In the plodding, po-faced Outer Range (Amazon Prime Video) he plays – hold on to your Stetson – a hard-bitten rancher trying to stay connected to the Old Ways in a fast-changing world. The added component is a tiresome supernatural storyline involving a giant magic hole and a ghost buffalo that appears at moments of existential crisis for taciturn Royal Abbot (Brolin).

The blood-curdling bison also has an annoying habit of materialising whenever Royal is running around at night with his shirt off. This happens a lot, for reasons a lugubrious screenplay fails to satisfactorily explain. It’s all a bit Twin Peaks – to the point where you half-expect Kyle MacLachlan to step into the frame, pursued by a dancing dwarf. The series is further hobbled by the frustrating decision to film key scenes at night and in near total darkness. It is hard not to conclude that the murk is a useful distraction from the laboured dialogue and limp plot.

That’s no ding against Brolin, who fills up the screen with 10-gallon gruffness. Brolin was, of course, the star of the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, the definitive deconstruction of America’s ruggedness. And he returns to that same well of macho melancholy as Royal. He’s the stubborn head of a Wyoming cattle farming dynasty on the wrong side of history. Royal is also haunted by the unsolved disappearance several months previously of his daughter-in law, and by flashbacks to his own enigmatic upbringing (he has no clear memories of his life before he was nine).

He is, meanwhile and inevitably, locked in a dispute over land with a more successful neighbouring clan, the Tillersons. And then, as if the spectral buffalo wasn’t enough, things take a further turn for the unsettling when creepy backpacker Autumn (Imogen Poots) asks permission to camp on the Abbots’s land. Royal is clearly the sort to say “no” to such a request. And yet, because the story demands it, he says “yes” anyway.

Brooding braggadocio is Royal’s daily bread as he and his clan grapple with the challenges of staying in business as an independent farm. That powder-keg of resentment and frustration detonates at the end of the first episode via a bloody twist that threatens everything Royal and sons Perry (Tom Pelphrey) and Rhett (Lewis Pullman) have worked towards. Fortunately the super-massive black hole out back is just what Royal needs as he sets out – under an impenetrable blanket of darkness – to dispose of some damning evidence .

Awkwardly, Autumn is on hand to witness the skulduggery. And so she and Royal are made reluctant co-conspirators – their connection strengthened by the revelation that they may share a childhood trauma linked to a mysterious cult.

Outer Range is a lumbering, self-serious hodgepodge of sci-fi and modern Western. Brolin and Poots have, to their credit, bought into the premise of a magical realist love letter to the passing into history of a certain idea of American self-sufficiency. Audiences, though, may find Outer Range more drab than fab – epic only in its drawn-out running time and crying out for a close encounter with a cattle prod.