Territory wants to be Australia's Yellowstone and it gets close enough to matter

Look, the Yellowstone comparison is right there in the pitch document. Everyone involved knows it. Netflix knows it. The cast knows it. The critics who wrote their first paragraphs before the screeners arrived know it. Territory is a cattle-station dynasty drama set in the Northern Territory, and it wants to be the Australian Yellowstone with the same appetite for family betrayal, landscape photography, and men on horseback delivering dialogue about legacy. The show courts this comparison openly, and the question is not whether it earns it but whether earning it is enough.

The answer, honestly, is complicated. Territory is good in ways that are specific and less good in ways that are structural, and the gap between those two things is where the show lives.

The Lawson family and their volume

The Lawsons own Marianne Station, the largest cattle station in the world, and the show opens with a death that fractures the family along lines that were already cracked. Colin Lawson (Robert Taylor) is the patriarch, and Taylor plays him with the granite-jawed restraint that Australian audiences will recognise from his years on Longmire. Emily Lawson (Anna Torv) is married to Colin’s eldest son and is the show’s centre of gravity, because Torv is incapable of being anything other than compelling, even when the material is giving her less than she deserves. Michael Dorman plays Graham Lawson, the second son, the disappointment, the one with debts and bad instincts, and Dorman (who was brilliant in The Invisible Man and underused in almost everything else) does the best work of the ensemble.

The family dynamics are the engine, and they run hot. This is not a show interested in subtlety. People betray each other at full volume. Secrets are revealed in scenes that are staged like confrontations, because they are confrontations. The Lawsons do not have quiet conversations about disappointment. They have shouting matches in homesteads while the camera pulls back to show the vastness of the land they are fighting over, and the contrast between the scale of the property and the pettiness of the disputes is a point the show makes repeatedly, without ever quite deciding if it is making it ironically.

The landscape as character (and as sales pitch)

The Northern Territory looks extraordinary. This is not news to anyone who has been there, but it is apparently news to Netflix’s international audience, which is who this show is primarily built for. The aerial shots of the station are the kind of footage that makes you understand why drone operators get hired before writers. The light is that specific Top End light, golden and violent, and the show uses it relentlessly. Every establishing shot is a landscape painting. Every sunset is calibrated to make someone in a London flat think about booking a holiday.

This is where the Netflix global-audience model creates its central tension. Territory is set in the Northern Territory and populated by Australian actors speaking in Australian accents about Australian problems, but it is shaped by the same forces that shape every Netflix original in every territory: it must be legible to audiences who have no context. The cattle industry is explained. The distances are noted. The heat is mentioned. The Indigenous land-rights subplot is present but handled with a caution that feels like the product of many meetings rather than genuine creative engagement.

The show is not bad on these subjects. It is careful, which is a different thing, and sometimes a worse one.

The supporting cast carrying the load

The best parts of Territory are happening at the edges. The supporting cast is stacked with performers doing specific, detailed work that the central plot does not always deserve. Joe Barton as a station hand with his own claims on the land. Clarence Ryan bringing a physical stillness that contrasts with the Lawson family’s constant emotional motion. Sara Wiseman as a neighbouring landowner whose politeness is a weapon.

These performances are doing the thing that the main plotline sometimes forgets to do: they are making the world feel inhabited rather than constructed. The Lawson family drama is engaging in the way that all family dramas about money and land are engaging, but the supporting characters are the ones who make you believe that Marianne Station is a real place with real stakes, not a set with good lighting.

Whether the comparison holds

Yellowstone worked (when it worked, which was inconsistently) because Taylor Sheridan understood that the Dutton family was not just fighting over land. They were fighting over an idea of America that was already dead, and the tragedy of the show was that the characters could not see what was obvious to the audience. The land was the metaphor, and the metaphor was about loss.

Territory has not quite decided what the Lawsons are fighting about beyond the station itself. The land is beautiful, and it is valuable, and people want it, and that is the conflict. There is a version of this show where the Lawson family’s grip on Marianne Station is interrogated in terms of colonial legacy, Indigenous dispossession, and environmental change, and the show gestures toward that version without committing to it. The gestures are visible. The commitment is not.

What it is and what it could be

Six episodes is not enough to build what this show needs. The first season is a proof of concept more than a complete work, and the concept is proven: the cast is strong, the location is spectacular, the appetite for an Australian dynasty drama clearly exists. Whether the second season (which has been confirmed) deepens the family dynamics or just amplifies them is the question that will determine whether Territory becomes something genuinely good or remains a show that looks great and sounds loud and never quite finds the frequency it is reaching for.

Torv deserves a season where the writing matches her performance. Dorman deserves more screen time. Taylor deserves a character note beyond stoicism. The landscape does not need anything. The landscape is already doing everything the show asks and more.

Honestly, I will watch the second season. That is not nothing.