National parks are America’s treasures. Beloved by conservationists, outdoor adventurers, vacationing families, and almost everyone else who identifies as a patriot, they have been celebrated in stunning documentary series that boast narration from Barack Obama (Netflix’s Our Great National Parks) and the imprimatur of Ken Burns, who titled his 12-hour PBS epic The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. They’ve popped up in films as different as Wild, North by Northwest, and E.T. In recent years, their most prominent pop-culture role has probably been as the breathtaking backdrop to Taylor Sheridan’s hit TV Western franchise Yellowstone.
But rarely have the parks themselves—their vastness, their complexity, the official and unofficial denizens who live and work within them—been as central to a story as Yosemite is to Untamed, a six-episode Netflix crime drama created by Mark L. Smith (American Primeval) and Elle Smith. Almost certainly a product of audiences’ addiction to detective procedurals and streamers’ desperation to find their own Yellowstone, the series is, as written and acted, mediocre. It’s worth watching, though, if you’re fascinated by the inner workings of a place like Yosemite, if you savor the sights and sounds of the wilderness, and if you’re intrigued by the idea that a park might conceal ugliness and corruption even as it showcases the most radiant natural beauty.
Untamed is, in terms of plot, a familiar sort of dead-girl mystery. A pair of climbers scaling the terrifying 90-degree wall of Yosemite’s El Capitan nearly get themselves killed catching, in their ropes, a young woman who plummets off the top of the cliff. But they’re too late to save her life. Though it would be politically expedient to declare the woman’s death a suicide, Agent Kyle Turner (Eric Bana) of the National Parks Service’s Investigative Services Branch—who we know is the genuine article because he rappels down the…
