2025 - 2025
Netflix dropped Untamed on 17 July 2025 as a six-episode limited series and it slipped quietly into the summer schedule without the marketing blitz a show this good probably deserved. Eric Bana plays Kyle Turner, a special agent with the National Park Service's Investigative Services Branch, the real federal outfit that handles serious crimes on federal land. The opening hook is a body at the base of El Capitan in Yosemite. What looks at first like a climbing accident does not stay that way, and Turner has the kind of reputation with the park brass where giving him a complicated case feels like a choice somebody is going to regret.
The show was created by Mark L. Smith, who wrote The Revenant, and his daughter Elle Smith. That lineage shows in the DNA of the thing. Same patient cinema-of-the-outdoors pacing, same interest in what the wilderness does to men who go into it alone, same weight given to silence. Six episodes. No filler. The whole arc is built to end exactly when it does.
Bana carries it. He has been quietly good for twenty-five years now and this might be the most comfortable he has looked in a lead role since Munich. Turner is a man who has been hollowed out by something the show reveals slowly and I will not spoil. Bana plays him with a stillness that can tip into menace when he is pushed, and it is the small behaviour that sells it. The way he sits on a hotel-room bed with his hands on his knees. The half-second he takes too long to answer a question. Small things, really, and easy to miss on a first watch, but what they add up to is a man who has stopped making eye contact with anyone who wants to help him.
Sam Neill as Chief Ranger Paul Souter is the other half of the show's emotional engine. Neill is 77 and still the most effortlessly watchable man on any screen he appears in. Paul is Turner's oldest friend, a husband and a father, now a grandfather too, who has worn the Park Service uniform for nearly half his life, and Neill plays him with a warmth that makes the scenes between the two men land harder than any crime-scene beat.
Lily Santiago plays Naya Vasquez, a rookie ranger who has transferred in from a city beat and is learning on the worst possible case. Santiago is the closest thing the show has to an audience surrogate, and her scenes with Bana do a lot of quiet work to give us a way in to Turner without him ever having to explain himself.
Rosemarie DeWitt plays Jill, Turner's ex-wife, now remarried and working as a realtor. DeWitt is wonderful as always. She does not get a huge amount of screen time but every minute she has is loaded.
Wilson Bethel as Shane Maguire, an ex-Army Ranger now working as the park's Wildlife Management Officer, is the show's other key presence. Raoul Max Trujillo plays Jay Stewart, a park employee and indigenous friend of Turner who provides a line into the older history of the land. William Smillie, J.D. Pardo, and Nicola Correia-Damude round out a tight ensemble.
Elle Smith
Creator / Writer
Nicola Correia-Damude
Esther Avalos
Rosemarie DeWitt
Jill Bodwin
William Smillie
Bruce Milch
Raoul Max Trujillo
Jay Stewart
J.D. Pardo
Michael
Mark L. Smith
Creator / Writer
Wilson Bethel
Shane Maguire
The murder plot is the engine, not the cargo. What Untamed actually wants to talk about is grief, and the specific way a person who will not deal with it ends up choosing a job that keeps putting him in rooms where other people's grief is the assignment. Turner is a man built for this work because he is broken in ways that make the rest of the agency uncomfortable.
There is also a real interest in the National Park Service itself as an institution. The ISB is one of the most under-dramatised law-enforcement outfits on American television, and Mark L. Smith clearly did his homework. The show gets small details right. Rangers who see the park as a community they protect do not always welcome the outside investigators who drop in on cases, the budget is always tight, and policing a vast wilderness where help is hours away is a genuinely hard thing to do.
Untamed is interested in the question of what a place does to the people who love it too much.
The Smiths are not sentimental about nature. Yosemite is magnificent and it is also, in this show, a place where people die badly and often, where remote cabins hide ugly things, where the distance between a trailhead and help is measured in hours.
The cinematography is the other lead. The show was shot largely in British Columbia doubling for Yosemite, with second-unit and aerial work at the actual park, and the result is a visual register that feels closer to The Revenant than to a standard streamer procedural. Granite walls. Black forests. Rivers you would not want to fall into. Long establishing shots that let the scale of the place do the work before a line of dialogue has been spoken.
A few tonal hallmarks that stuck with me:
There is a patience to the filmmaking that I do not see often on streaming. Scenes are allowed to breathe. Characters are allowed to sit in silence. You can feel the Mark L. Smith sensibility at work here, the same one that made The Revenant a 156-minute film that never feels long.
Untamed landed with strong reviews and became one of Netflix's most-watched limited series of the summer. Critics singled out Bana's performance and the show's refusal to rush its six-episode runway. The Netflix audience responded. The finale held near the top of the Netflix Global Top 10 for several weeks, and the word-of-mouth on it was unusually warm for a show launched with so little fanfare.
Netflix subsequently announced Untamed Season 2, which confirms what the ending of Season 1 implied, that the Smiths always planned this as an anthology or a continuing run rather than a hard-ended miniseries. What that looks like in practice is a question the second season will have to answer, but there is a model here. True Detective did it. Fargo does it every few years. The one-and-done limited series is a fine form, but so is the case-of-the-season anthology, and Untamed has the bones for either.
Within its genre the closest sibling on this site is probably Dark Winds, another show about investigators in remote American wilderness who are carrying their own histories into the work. If you liked that one, this is your next watch. Fans of the grieving-detective register of Mare of Easttown or the atmospheric weight of season one True Detective will also find a lot to love, and anyone who enjoyed The Old Man for Jeff Bridges doing haunted-older-man work will see a Bana turn in the same register.
I went in expecting a decent Netflix procedural with a pretty backdrop and came out thinking it is one of the better crime limited series of 2025. Six episodes. Tight. The writing trusts you. Bana and Neill give it an emotional centre you do not often get on a show with this much murder in it. The place does what the place should do in this kind of story, which is hold the moral weight of what is happening in front of it.
Is it perfect? No. The middle hour sags slightly, and a couple of supporting arcs feel trimmed for time in a way that suggests there was a longer cut. But those are small complaints against a show that nails what it sets out to do.
If you have been missing the kind of atmospheric American crime storytelling that used to live at HBO and has migrated elsewhere, Untamed is where it went this year. Worth your evening.
Sam Neill
Chief Ranger Paul Souter
Lily Santiago
Naya Vasquez
Eric Bana
Kyle Turner