Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell are terrific in drippy drama The Madison

Taylor Sheridan is a man of many talents, but he’s especially good at two things: making soapy television dramas that appeal to mass audiences and peppering them with moments that seem expressly designed to infuriate TV critics. 

Sheridan’s new show The Madison has “hit” written all over it. It stars two of the most likable actors of their generation, Kurt Russell and Michelle Pfeiffer, playing an enormously wealthy old married couple, Preston and Stacy Clyburn. These two have the kind of idealized, aspirational love that makes viewers swoon. They’re best friends and still hot for each other after decades together, much of which they’ve spent raising two high-maintenance daughters and doting on two granddaughters. They’re good television.

Even the lone rift between Mr. and Mrs. Clyburn is pretty adorable. Preston likes to take every opportunity he can to fly out to Montana, where he and his reclusive brother Paul (Matthew Fox) own a chunk of land and some rustic cabins near a good fishing stream. Stacy, who prefers indoor plumbing and electricity, lets Paul have his bro time while she hangs back with the kids in Manhattan, eating in fine restaurants and attending charity functions with society ladies.

And it’s here where Sheridan, inevitably, starts Sheridan-ing up The Madison. A sequence of events convinces Stacy to leave New York behind for a while and see what Montana has to offer. The first event: the younger Clyburn daughter, Paige (Elle Chapman), gets mugged in broad daylight while shopping on Fifth Avenue. This prompts a lot of tsk-tsk-ing about the state of the world in general and New York in particular, with Stacy commiserating with Preston by phone and her friends over lunch about how crime in the city is out of control. Right from the start, Sheridan is putting any left-leaning viewers (with their stack of “well, actually” crime-rate statistics) on the defensive.

The charitable reading of Paige’s mugging and Stacy’s disgust is that Sheridan is—as always—working in broad strokes. He’s telling a love story, not delivering a newspaper. He’s allowed to exaggerate for the sake of stoking his potboiler. But he surely knows that the whole “cities are unlivable now because of all the criminals” take has become a huge right-wing-media talking point. Leading off the show with this feels like a direct, intentional provocation. It’s not The Madison’s last.

For example, after Paige is attacked, she finds a couple of NYPD officers in a patrol car, and when they ask her to identify the suspect, she freezes on the question of the mugger’s race. She simply refuses to describe the color of someone’s skin. Throughout The Madison, Sheridan not-so-subtly suggests a connection between city-dwelling, bleeding-heart liberalism, self-absorption, rudeness, and a debilitating lack of physical and emotional hardiness. In a later scene—seemingly engineered to outrage viewers on both sides of the political spectrum—Stacy’s grandkids get infuriatingly huffy when a friendly Montanan named Cade (Kevin Zegers) drops by the family cabin with a container of “Indian tacos.” It’s racist for Cade to use that word, the kids insist.

After Cade is gone, Stacy rips her granddaughters—and their mom, Abigail (Beau Garrett)—for being “spoiled bitches.” In a Sheridan show, these kinds of scenes are the protein: the moments when the fed-up heroes get to rant about someone else’s arrogance or ignorance right in their stupid face. Pfeiffer’s Stacy gets a couple of these moments, in which she icily lectures her offspring and her offspring’s offspring about their attachment to their cell phones, exhaustingly picky diets, or general prioritizing of their own desires and demands. Stacy is a self-described “city mouse,” too, but because she loves Preston so much, she’s more open to other perspectives.

In fact, when Stacy finally does make it to Montana, she grasps almost immediately why Preston loves it. The bulk of the season is set in Big Sky country, and most of the tension is between the newly converted outdoorswoman Stacy and her kids and grandkids, who do not warm to rusticity as easily. (One semi-exception is Stacy and Preston’s congenial, milquetoast son-in-law Russell, who’s played by Patrick J. Adams.) Most of the episodes involve the Clyburns complaining, Stacy boiling over, and the youngsters apologizing and trying to make things right…only to go right back to complaining in the next episode.