A family at war with itself, a fierce succession battle, and jockeying for power over a sprawling cattle station — if I didn’t know any better, I’d say it sounds like Netflix has taken a page from the success of Paramount’s for one of its newest series. , which hits the streaming giant later this month ( ), obviously won’t have Kevin Costner on hand to play a grizzled family patriarch or to lend his writing chops — but the new show does have at least one secret weapon that I can see. That would be Robert Taylor, the Australia-born actor who looked straight out of central casting for his role as a Wyoming lawman in .
In , he’s the John Dutton-esque Colin Lawson, owner of the largest cattle ranch in the world. It occupies an Australian Outbreak spread that Lawson rules with an iron fist as an empire unto itself. In other words, this is not the Australia of babes and Bondi Beach.
, from creators Timothy Lee and Ben Davies, is set in (and was likewise filmed in) wild, desolate country that’s barely inhabited. To sort of put the show into perspective, consider the fact that Australia is roughly equivalent in size to the lower 48 US states, with a third of the population. Also, there are some property owners in the outback territory that have land holdings bigger than some countries.
“When Marianne Station is left without a clear successor,” Netflix explains about the cattle station at the heart of the six-episode , “generational clashes threaten to tear the L.
