‘Territory’ Review: Netflix’s ‘Yellowstone’-esque Aussie Drama

The Netflix algorithm will attempt to lure you into watching Territory for its familiarity.

The six-part drama is almost explicitly an Aussie version of Yellowstone, or else a modern-day version of Australia, with none of those pesky Baz Luhrmann aesthetic trappings. Heck, you might as well call it Amazon’s Open Range without the huge hole at the center of the story. 

It’s a series positively overflowing with recognizable faces from American television freed to use variations on their native accents, including leads from Fringe (Anna Torv), Longmire (Robert Taylor), The CW’s awful Beauty & the Beast (Jay Ryan) and Patriot (Michael Dorman).

As such, I guess you could enjoy Territory for all of the reasons it feels like countless other pieces of entertainment you’ve enjoyed. But me, I stuck with Territory for the handful of ways it’s distinctive — like the combination of Australian slang and cattle ranching jargon that’s practically a foreign language, the gorgeous photography of the country’s Northern Territory and, yes, the number of recognizable actors who get to wear chaps and and talk about obscure facets of international real estate law. Those aren’t necessarily big promises of originality and flair, but they’re the limited promises on which this constantly watchable drama delivers.

Standing in for the Yellowstone‘s Duttons as ranching royalty are the Lawsons, owners and operators of Marianne Station — the world’s largest cattle operation, occupying terrain the size of Belgium. A paragon of abusive toxic masculinity, aging patriarch Colin (Taylor) has passed the station along to youngest son Daniel (Jake Ryan), in part because eldest son Graham (Dorman) is an erratic alcoholic and in part because Graham married Emily (Torv), part of a neighboring clan known for stealing and rebranding Lawson cattle. 

Colin, stuck in the past, ran Marianne into the ground, but Daniel has been trying to innovate. Except that in the opening moments of the premiere, Daniel is eaten by dingos, or something comparably Australian, creating a vast power vacuum that involves Graham, Emily, Emily’s glowering ex (Jay Ryan’s Campbell), inevitably nefarious mining billionaire Sandra (Sara Wiseman), the local Indigenous community (fronted by Clarence Ryan’s Nolan, a low-level rancher) and more. 

Things get soapier and more complicated when Graham and Emily’s daughter Susie (Philippa Northeast) returns from university with big ideas about the station’s future and starts flirting with Sandra’s son Lachie (Joe Klocek), while Marshall (Sam Corlett), Graham’s black sheep son from a previous marriage, turns up with scruffy and possibly scheming ruffians Rich (Sam Delich) and Sharnie (Kylah Day).

Created by Ben Davies and Timothy Lee, Territory is boldly and unapologetically meat-and-potatoes television, in which everybody is gruff, sweaty and coated in a fine layer of dust, as if to reenforce the connection between these characters and the Top End. 

If that isn’t enough, the dialogue is bursting with references to “family” and “the land” and “legacy.” The machinations are rudimentary, the love triangles perfunctory and the cliffhangers mostly predictable (though at least one shocker I fully expected the show to squirm away from managed to stick). But the commitment to every genre trope is fully sincere. The pretty people kiss, the bulls stampede and even if you don’t know a duster (of the jacket variety) from a muster (a roundup of some sort), the road across this rough terrain has been so reliably paved that the journey is almost too smooth.

I think Territory does better than Yellowstone in its attempts at weaving the Native perspective into the storytelling. No matter how complex the regional concepts of land ownership might be, however, there’s little doubt that when it comes to the fight between attractive white people saying “Mine! Mine! Mine!” and the Traditional Owners (not an expression I previously knew) saying “Um, excuse me?” the narrative’s heart lies with the Lawsons — even if its mind may know better.

One could make fun of director Greg McLean for an overreliance on soaring drone shots of the Outback, all impeccably framed at dawn or in the gloaming. But nobody here wants to redefine the visual language of cinema, nor push boundaries for violence (lots of drunken punching and occasional shooting) or sex (steamy smooching is all). The goal is just to make your jaw drop a little more at each vista or bovine throng, and it works. Setting some sort of televisual record for using the word “escarpment” and depicting vast escarpments, Territory would look superb streamed on your Apple Watch — though I’d advice viewing on a bigger screen if you want to see the impressive cragginess of the older actors’ faces or revel in the angular cheekbones of the younger stars.

Given the amount of death and betrayal and intense business maneuvering required by the plot, it’s no surprise that the primary emotions evoked by most of the cast are “intensity” and “fatigue,” but they all do it reasonably well. Graham’s drunkenness gives Dorman the opportunity to play volatile, while Emily’s family upbringing lets Torv shade her character with enigmatic potential. Delich and Dan Wyllie, as Emily’s proudly cow-thieving brother Hank, are in a wilder, more flamboyant show than everybody else. Day and Corlett are in a swoonier one than everybody else. Ryan, Hamilton Morris and Tuuli Narkle, representing the Indigenous side, are in a more serious-mined and occasionally more provocative series than everybody else, one that makes an effort at more spiritual and historical nuance than Territory really has room for.

The show has a lot to pack into a small amount of time. Heard the expression “All hat and no cattle”? The cattle in Territory may not have a lot of genetic diversity — it’s a plot point! — and the hats may look a bit worn around the edges. But whatever you’re looking for, this series has a lot of it.