The series revolves around the story of America's birth as a superpower in record time. The series tells the story of the bloody rise and fall of one oil empire in Texas in that period.
While I wish The Son was more dramatically engaging, it is certainly the kind of program that warrants thematic dissection and discussion. And we can't have enough of those.
Without a great authoritative figure to lift the entire piece to a mythic level, The Son may have been better off in book form - where readers can imagine the Texas described in its pages.
Missed opportunities and hard choices propel The Son. It echoes Giant and Dallas yet holds the nostalgia to deliver a fresh, engrossing take on Westerns.
The series functions much the same as the oil the McCullochs desperately seek in the early 1900s storyline: It's obvious something is there, but nobody has figured out how to get to it.
While AMC is known for some of TV's best dramas, and while the cinematography in The Son is grand, this western doesn't promise to become more than "Dallas" on the frontier.
