Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Big Sky’ On ABC, A David E. Kelley Series About Some Creepy Things Going On In Montana

After a period where he was writing about mysteries about coastal elites, David E. Kelley is back to the small-town-in-the-heartland genre with Big Sky. The town isn’t as small as Rome where his series Picket Fences took place; Helena is the capital of Montana. But it’s still a far cry from New York or Monterrey. But can he take what he was able to do on HBO and apply it to a network series?

BIG SKY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of the mountains and greenery in Montana, then the exterior of a diner called the Dirty Spoon.

The Gist: Even though Helena is Montana’s capital, it’s also a small town where everyone is in everyone else’s business. So when Jenny Hoyt (Katheryn Winnick) abruptly leaves the diner, the waitress knows why. Jenny goes to the investigative business she and her estranged husband Cody (Ryan Phillippe) own with Cassie Dewell (Kylie Bunbury) to confront Cassie about sleeping with Cody, despite knowing that the two of them were trying to reconcile.

Meanwhile, long-haul trucker Ronald Pergman (Brian Geraghty) is being berated by his mother Helen (Valerie Mahaffey) for still living at home and having no ambition. At a truck stop, he sweet talks “Michelle”, aka Jerrie Kennedy (Jesse James Keitel), a woman who does sex work in order to fund her singing ambitions, but ends up tasering her and wrapping her in plastic.

Two sisters, Grace and Danielle Sullivan (Jade Pettyjohn, Natalie Alyn Lind), are driving up from Colorado so Danielle can hang out with her boyfriend Justin (Gage Marsh), who happens to be Cody and Jenny’s son. On the way, they’re delayed by an accident on the interstate, and before they make the turnoff onto a dark road in Yellowstone National Park, they’re almost run off the road by an enraged Pergman. When they run into car trouble, Pergman catches up with them and violently tasers them and loads them in his truck with Jerrie.

When Justin tells his parents that Danielle and Grace haven’t been in touch, Jenny and Cassie form a reluctant partnership (after a bar fight), and Cody goes to meet state trooper Rick Legarski (John Carroll Lynch) to find out about a cult that operates in the area. Legarski is close to retirement and just wants to stay on the good side of the people of the region. But he agrees to go with Cody to the church compound where the cult is located. Whether he does it or not is another matter.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Big Sky feels like a combination of David E. Kelley’s earliest and most recent series. Sort of like Picket Fences mixed with Big Little Lies with his attempt to throw in some Lynchian elements from Twin Peaks.

Our Take: Kelley based Big Sky on The Highway, a series of novels by C.J. Box, who is also an executive producer on this series. What it feels like he’s trying to do is bring the mysterious, time-bending vibe of BLL and his other HBO series, The Undoing to “flyover country” and network television. There are pieces here that work, and stitched together into a whole could have made for a compelling series. But Kelley jams so many concepts into the show’s first hour that it’s hard to figure out exactly where he’s going.

And let’s get this out of the way: There is a HUGE twist at the end of Episode 1 that comes so out of left field that it jolted us out of our lethargy while watching the pilot and immediately made us want to watch more. But, once we got to Episode 2, the same structural problems that plagued Episode 1 came to the fore, making us wonder what Kelley’s motivations for the massive twist were, aside from shocking the audience into wanting to see what happens.

Of course, I can’t discuss exactly what the twist is, and that hampers what I can say about Episode 2, and a lot about what I can say about Episode 1. But despite the coming together of the disparate story threads the pilot presented, they don’t necessarily combine well.

For instance, Lynch is great at playing the weird trooper Legarski, who tries to be folksy and do things like calling his wife “Mother,” when all she does is want to be touched sexually by him, but weirdness stops being effective when he becomes more of a focus. Geraghty, as the creepy AF Pergman, is the best part of both episodes, but his complicated relationship with his mother, along with his penchant for calling himself a “hero” because truckers are needed during the pandemic just makes him quirky but doesn’t inform his character, at least not in the context of why he actually kidnaps these women.

The triangle between the Hoyts and Cassie seems to be there to set up the uncomfortable partnership, and it seems that Cassie is such an insightful detective, you wonder why she didn’t become a cop to begin with. And the less said about the teen sisters, the better, though we found both Pettyjohn and Lind appealing.

None of the show’s problems are that egregious, except for the twist that shall not be discussed. But as a whole, it feels like a series of scenes from other shows, some procedural, some of the serialized variety, that are supposed to cohere into a whole, and it just doesn’t get there.

Sex and Skin: Cody and Jenny have some angry sex after she confronts him about Cassie. But it’s all network sex.

Parting Shot: Again, there’s a twist at the end of the pilot that would be a massive spoiler, so that’s all I can say about that.

Sleeper Star: Jesse James Keitel, a nonbinary actor themselves, shines as the trans singer/prostitute Jerrie, especially in the second episode, when she not only works with the sisters to try to flush out Pergman, but also shows Pergman that she may not exactly be what he was looking for.

Most Pilot-y Line: As much as we love Dedee Pfeiffer, and haven’t seen her in a regular role for some time, we’re not sure what function her character, Denise Brisbane, serves in the overall story. She’s a little dizzy and a bit of a buttinsky. But not sure why she’s there other than just another body at the Hoyt-Dewell investigative agency.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Big Sky has that shock at the end of the first episode that may keep you watching, but you’ll learn that the story that goes from that point isn’t really all that compelling.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Big Sky On ABC.com