But before your run away in terror I want you to understand that when it comes to series these days "just ok" is often more than enough. There is so much slop that is thrown at us that "just ok" could actually be considered really good.
This series is lacking coherent possibility and relies very often on insane coincidences that are not explained at all in order to progress the story... such as.... Woman police type who is kind of working on a case decides one day to just wander around in some random cave and literally falls through the floor in order to discover something that completely opens this case up for further investigation. If that sounds nuts well this happens a lot in this series and the example I just stated is literally in this show.
I do enjoy the name-dropping of "from A writer of The Revenant and American Primeval" .... ok, why did you use the word "a" instead of "the?" Dig into it and you'll find out why they are being clever with their wording :)
So this story takes place in Yosemite National Park and there is some sketchy stuff that is revealed when moody Kyle Turner (Eric Bana) turns up and refuses to accept the on site authorities' explanation about how a climber fell to her death and because of his stubborn ways it turns out he was correct! Wow! imagine that! Thus begins our adventure with a branch of law enforcement that I didn't know existed: NPSISB or National Park Service Investigative Services Branch! Man, i'm not even gonna look up if this is a real thing.
So the story is just about Kyle and how he keeps trying to solve this mystery despite the fact that most of the people in the park service don't like the dude and don't want to help him
The story is a bit interesting I suppose and you will be questioning things that you have already seen because where the story is heading is constantly changing but not always in a good way. Since we, the audience, get to see the entire story from all perspectives we have to remember that the park service doesn't know where the guilty parties are, even though (and I'm not going to spoil this) it is truly stupid how the baddies didn't even do a good job hiding anything really.
The plot thickens as things go forward and they end each episode on a cliff-hanger that has you wanting to watch the next episode even though you know from the previous episodes that you just watched that the next one is mostly going to be very slow-moving... and this is one of the show's downsides. It is a mini-series by its own designation but man oh man does it seem unnecessarily long as shit
Despite this tedium and really slow-moving plot one saving grace was that much like Yellowstone this show has amazing scenery that will keep you captivated and make you want to visit a national park at some point in your life. Unlike Yellowstone though, the story really struggles to keep up with the interesting level of the amazing backdrops.
Most of the characters are completely ludicrous and a great many of their relationships with one another seem a bit forced. I have to be reminded that one of the dinosaur doctors from Jurassic Park is actually in this thing because he doesn't get much screen time.
So Sam Neill isn't in much of this but his name is in the cast so I guess that means something. But you know what IS in this series? Beards... lots of them. Some of the only people that don't get on board the beard-parade are the squatting hippies and while I know this is stupid, I found it disturbing. You mean to tell me that squatting hippies have a really dedicated face-shaving protocol? Well the realism just went right out the window!
Now before you get too excited about the aforementioned scenery being wonderful there is one thing I want you to understand. A vast majority of this film was made in British Columbia because it is MUCH cheaper to film in Canada than it is in USA. I know I have pointed this out before but you can HEAR the Canada in the voice of all the minor characters that were probably recruited from the local area.
The overall story is riddled with impossibilities and coincidences that the story relies on and to me this is kind of lazy story-telling. The overall series is also quite formulaic in how each episode begins with a recap of what has already happened in previous episodes, then a whole lot of arguing and time-wasting happens, then some big event happens, then we are left with a cliffhanger. It's been used so many times before but the biggest offender in my mind is probably The Walking Dead so if you remember that formula, Untamed is told in basically the same way.
I'm not exactly singing the praises of this show but I watch about one episode a day and it's reasonably entertaining as long as you don't concern yourself with any of these happenings actually being possible or not.
If you have nothing else that you are watching then I don't see the harm in it. For me it has been a lot of fun because I routinely make fun of how silly a lot of the situations they find themselves in are.. and how the illegal part of what they are attempting to describe in this show is so amateurish that they would have been busted long before a national park investigator needed to get involved. But what they wanted was to get some sort of CSI into the woods and well, they managed to pull that off.
at the moment this can only be legally streamed on Netflix
