Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell’s show tackles … wealthy coastal elites?

Here is a brief list of things that various members of the private-jet-level wealthy New York City family in Taylor Sheridan’s new Paramount+ show The Madison don’t know: What the word spartan means. The fact that polenta and grits are the same thing. The fact that strawberries can “be grown” and don’t just “come from farms.” What calamine lotion is. The fact that “scat” means “poop.” What a “food chain” is. What a pinball machine is. What an Irish car bomb (drink version) is. How to cook a meal.

Yes, in Sheridan’s version of Manhattan, there are no sunsets, people attend memorial services and make snarky comments about the catering (“You’re only going to die once, at least get Il Buco”), and fancy young women who get punched on Fifth Avenue by muggers refuse to report the muggers’ race to the police for fear of seeming politically incorrect. Finally, we’re seeing America’s most influential blue-state, East Coast city through the eyes of this writer who’s notoriously obsessed with Red America—and it’s not pretty. It’s no wonder the Clyburn family, led by their matriarch Stacy (Michelle Pfeiffer), need to abscond to Montana, where the golden hour lasts all day, people say “Indian” instead of “Native American,” and the neighbors are paragons of neighborliness.

The Madison’s first three episodes of six drop on the streamer this Sunday, followed by the second half next week. Unlike the new Yellowstone spinoff Marshals, this series, which has been alternately billed as both a Yellowstone spinoff and an unrelated original drama, boasts no Duttons so far—just the Clyburns, a group of five very well-groomed blond gals, plus a son-in-law, Russell (Suits’ Patrick J. Adams), a private-equity guy who’s hilariously useless outside of the city. This lost flock used to have a patriarch—Preston Clyburn, played by Kurt Russell—who loved Montana and spent a lot of time there visiting his brother, Paul (a gray and wiry Matthew Fox), fly-fishing and hand-building a small group of cabins by the Madison River.

The Madison is being advertised as a Kurt Russell–and–Michelle Pfeiffer show, so it may surprise viewers to realize that—mild spoiler alert—Russell’s character dies in a plane crash halfway through Episode 1. The death gives the show a very Nicholas Sparks feeling, as Preston still makes appearances via a logbook he leaves in his cabin that Stacy reads, and in flashbacks in Stacy’s mind. The two seem to have had a lot of conversations about evolutionary history. “Men thrive when they’re singularly focused; women thrive with multiple tasks,” Preston says to explain the appeal of Montana to Stacy, who, luxuriating in a bubble bath in an absolutely gorgeous freestanding tub, replies, “What a bunch of bullshit! Just say you want to go fishing with your brother.”

But Stacy loved Preston, as we hear over and over, and once he’s gone, she feels guilty that she didn’t make Montana a family destination more often, or maybe allow him to live a different kind of life, without mandatory appearances at the Met Gala—one more like his brother’s. The fact that this makes little sense—we see in other flashbacks that Paul was in Montana because his own grief has pushed him into a state of unhealthy isolation, and there’s no way Preston could have made the kind of bubble-bath/Met Gala money he made in New York while living in Montana—is honestly OK. This is grief; as the therapist played (totally straight-faced) by Will Arnett in later episodes says, it comes out in all kinds of ways.

Viewers of other Sheridan shows will spot recycled elements in The Madison—or, to put it more charitably, types of characters the showrunner has returned to over time. Sheridan loves to write rich women, and the Clyburns offer a full palette of possibilities. Stacy Clyburn calls her daughters and granddaughters “spoiled bitches” while she’s in the “anger” stage of her grief, and while that’s certainly one type of rich lady Sheridan likes to mock, the fixation is a little more multifaceted than that here. Stacy, like Demi Moore’s character Cami Miller on Landman, mourns her wealthy husband with a verve and commitment that starts to seem like wish fulfillment on the part of a wealthy, aging writer. Pfeiffer plays Stacy sharp, tired, and wise—an aspirational living legacy for a guy who did no wrong. Stacy, of course, says she will never love again.

Meanwhile, daughter Abigail (Beau Garrett), a Pilates-toned thirtysomething who wears jarringly heavy makeup every day of her visit in Montana, has married and divorced a useless musician and is living off her father’s money. Abby seems to be a Montana girl born in the wrong place, which you can see by the character detail of her having gotten pregnant at 20, and by the romantic plotline where she falls in love with a handsome sheriff (Ben Schnetzer)—shades of Yellowstone’s Beth Dutton, the sad little rich girl who was always going to end up with the cowboy Rip. And Abigail isn’t the only New York girl on The Madison who fantasizes about having sex with what Stacy would call a “real man.” In a startling conversation in a later episode, Stacy’s best friend from New York, who’s visiting Montana to help out, confesses that she wishes “some cousin of the Unabomber” would kidnap her and hold her in his cabin, in what she describes as “a warped romance-novel version of abduction.” Women, Sheridan perceives, all want this same thing—a man who will bury your dad and uncle on a hill by a river, using only horses, a shovel, and two leather straps.

Above all, Sheridan finds these women to be funny. Ali Larter and Billy Bob Thornton’s Landman spouses have ridiculous, one-sided, female-instigated fights, and so do the daughter Paige (Elle Chapman) and son-in-law Russell (Adams) in The Madison. Why would Paige blame Russell for the fact that she got ambushed by a hornet’s nest in the outhouse at the cabins, and got stung on the vagina, in the show’s early episodes? It’s hard to say, but the situation lets Sheridan write a beautiful and petulant woman, a personal specialty honed with Landman’s Ainsley and Angela. The fact that Chapman must deliver her angry lines with a bare, swollen ass surely adds to the appeal.

Yes, these women are ridiculous, as many of Sheridan’s women are. But, after so many seasons of the rich Duttons playing country on their show, there is something purifying about the divisions Sheridan sets out to explore in The Madison. Sheridan has been dancing around the urban–rural divide for years, writing Dutton patriarch speeches about the evils of the city, and of all the silly people who live there, and who want to come to Montana to feel free. Foolish journalists, real estate developers, and tourists cameoed on Yellowstone to prove the point. Now, with the Duttons’ long drama to the side, Sheridan asks: Is there any honest reason for a New Yorker to move to Montana? Stacy, Abby, and Paige are searching their hearts, and The Madison’s greenlit second season is already in the can.