Amazon Prime Video has renewed “Outer Range” for a second season. Charles Murray, who is under an overall deal at Amazon Studios, is joining the series as showrunner after Season 1 was showrun by creator Brian Watkins. Watkins will continue executive producing.
The Western sci-fi drama stars Josh Brolin as Royal Abbott, a rancher who is fighting to protect his family and discovers a mystery at the edge of Wyoming’s wilderness. The Abbotts are coping with the disappearance of daughter-in-law Rebecca (Kristen Connolly) and are pushed further to the brink when the Tillersons, the gaudy owners of the neighboring profit-driven ranch, make a play for their land. An untimely death in the community sets off a chain of events that come to a head with the arrival of a mysterious black void in the Abbotts’ west pasture. Imogen Poots, Lili Taylor, Tamara Podemski, Lewis Pullman, Tom Pelphrey, Noah Reid, Shaun Sipos, Isabel Arraiza, Olive Abercrombie and Will Patton also star.
Murray’s writing credits include “Sons of Anarchy,” “Luke Cage” and “Star Wars: The Clone Wars.”
Watkins and executive produces alongside Murray, Brolin, Zev Borow, Heather Rae, Robin Sweet, Tony Krantz, Amy Seimetz, Lawrence Trilling as well as Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner and Brad Pitt on behalf of Plan B Entertainment, which produces for Amazon Studios. Seimetz and Trilling also direct episodes, as do Alonso Ruizpalacios and Jennifer Getzinger.
Speaking to PvNew in June about the recent resurgence of the Western genre on TV, Watkins said, “We feel stuck, we feel like we want to reach up to a higher plain — or at least imagine a future that is different than the current place we live in. In that way, the Western is this real emblematic narrative of how and what we do with our dreams … so I’m thrilled there is such an investigation of the nooks and crannies of it right now. It’s a good time to write about cowboys and gunslinging.”
See Brolin’s appearance in PvNew‘s Actors on Actors series — where he interviews himself —here.
