Josh Brolin's Big Weird Hole to be plugged, as Amazon cancels Outer Range

Forestalling, permanently, our efforts to finally find out what was going on with Josh Brolin’s Big Weird Hole, Amazon’s Prime Video announced today that it’s canceling its sci-fi Western series Outer Range. The show starred Brolin as a Wyoming ranch owner who becomes embroiled with a strange young woman (Imogen Poots) while also discovering an apparently bottomless pit in the middle of his land. And while it would be reductive to refer to the series as “Yellowstone if Kevin Costner spent a lot of time jumping in and out of a magic hole,” it turns out that that’s a kind of reductiveness we can get comfortable with for the space of what will, likely, be the last thing we ever write about this show.

Outer Range, created by relative newcomer Brian Watkins (who was replaced as showrunner on the second season by Charles Murray), ran for two seasons on Prime Video, with the second season bringing in slightly more positive critical notes than the first. There seems to have been a general appreciation for Brolin and Poots, and for the sheer weirdness of the concept, but ultimately, the series never seemed to catch fire, either with Western fans, or audiences looking for their next big mystery show. Its second season aired in May of this year, and didn’t bring the show to any kind of final conclusion, so sorry Hole-Hounds: You’re never going to find out exactly what was going on with that big, rural abyss.

In addition to Poots and Brolin, Outer Range also starred Lili Taylor and Tom Pelphrey. And while Amazon has so far declined to issue a statement about the cancellation (which usually reads like a network or streamer washing their hands of a project they’d like to see the back of), Outer Ranger will remain a prime source of interviews in which Josh Brolin talks, repeatedly and earnestly, about the dangers and meaning of “the hole.”