Yahoo News 'Outer Range': Canadian Tamara Podemski stars in one of the most popular shows to stream right now
Podemski and costar Josh Brolin continue to hook fans with Season 2 of the Prime Video series
After Outer Range Season 2 premiered on Prime Video, the series quickly became one of the most popular shows on the streaming site. Canadian star Tamara Podemski and her costar Josh Brolin have continued to lead fans through shocking twists and turns in this sci-fi drama.
The Outer Range series has a lot of different components, but primarily revolves around time travel through this mysterious hole found on the Abbott family ranch, with Royal Abbott (Brolin) the patriarch of the family. In Season 2, Deputy Sheriff Joy (Podemski) has her own journey back through time, to the 1880s specifically, living with the Shoshone people.
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In Episode 4, in particular, there's a significant focus on Joy, which allows the audience to really appreciate what a captivating actor Podemski is, but also understand Joy in more detail than just the more "zipped up" character from Season 1.
"I was able to have conversations early on with our new showrunner, Charles Murray, where he allowed me to be very clear about some of my dreams and hopes for Joy," Podemski told Yahoo Canada. "I wanted her to be a badass that she is meant to be. I wanted to fight and do more stunts. I wanted to work with horses, I didn't get to ride at all in Season 1. I feel like I got everything that I wished for and it was just a dream to be able to embody Joy in such an exciting time and moment of her development as a woman."
"There's no way she could be that in Season 1. Season 1 she needed to be zipped up. ... To be pulled out of that world then allows her this space to grieve, to reconcile, to forgive. She is holding so much guilt and pressure and stress, and the stakes are so high in her world. The air needs to be let out. ... The world that she's in, in Season 2, which is far from her own world, allows her to let go of so much of that. And that is both emotional, but also, conceptually and politically, she needs to let go of who she was."
'I love complicated heroes'
One of the biggest reveals in Season 2 of Outer Range was the role that Joy's time travel played in nine-year-old Royal killing his father. In Season 1 the story told was that Royal shot his father in a hunting accident. In Season 2, we see Joy on the run, crossing paths with Royal, and his father instructed him to Joy. But Royal shoots his father instead.
"One thing I really liked about Royal, and also about Joy, you're given these people who we're told are meant to be the heroes of the story, but they make some really bad decisions," Podemski said. "And so you get angry at them and you want to root for them."
"I love complicated heroes and I also like when you kind of put the audience in the situation where it forces them to really ask, how much do you believe in them? How much do you have compassion for the bad decisions that they're making? ... And I think this show does a really good job of that with its heroes."
As Podemski describes, the Joy we see in Season 2 of Outer Range "helps people fall more in love with Royal, because of how their lives get intertwined."
"If you were upset with some of these decisions Royal made, Joy will help you have more compassion for the world that he came from, and what happened to him," Podemski said.
'It does ask you to think'
In terms of the elements of Outer Range that have attracted audiences to the show, Podemski highlighted how the show balances a variety of different themes in its storytelling.
"It's able to constantly go back and forth with those ... themes of colonial insanity, of greed, of patriarchy, of toxic masculinity, these huge, heavy, loaded themes, and then go really, really micro into families," Podemski said. "The second you can bring things into families, many people can relate to those dynamics."
"It does ask you to think though. ... We are asking you to work and keep all those things in your consciousness at once."
