‘THE SON’ RISE

‘Steele’ star Brosnan back on TV with AMC series

THE 1989 miniseries “Lone

some Dove” set the bar high for TV Westerns.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Larry McMurtry, it had the landscape, characters and enough poetry to sweep you into the story of two retired Texas Rangers (Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones) who embark on an epic cattle drive.

“The Son,” a 2017 Western series that debuts Saturday on AMC, is also based on a novel — this one by Philipp Meyer, who was nominated for a 2013 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Its story — of a child kidnapped by the Comanches in the mid-1850s who later becomes a ruthless cattle and oil baron — has been made into this TV series with two timelines: one showing Eli McCullough (Jacob Lofland) as he is indoctrinated into Native American society, and another in which the older Eli (Pierce Brosnan) is exposed to savagery, shaping his character.

Brosnan — who starred on NBC’s “Remington

Steele” before morphing into the big screen’s fifth James Bond — seems a little soft-spoken for the role of the patriarch who’s supposed to make rivals quake in their boots. His laid-back take on Eli colors the tone of the show when it switches from 1849 — where the young Eli gets his butt kicked on a regular basis by the Comanches — to 1915. The scenes of his initiation into an alien society are the most interesting in each episode, as Lofland conveys Eli’s vulnerabil- ity, grittiness and innate decency.

The older Eli goes about his business with a scorched-earth laconic style that doesn’t produce enough dramatic momentum as he tries to plan for the future of his dynasty — which includes two grown children, Phineas (David Wilson Barnes) and Pete (Henry Garrett) and a granddaughter, Jeanne (Sydney Lucas) — by getting out of the cattle business and into oil. He has the requisite enemy, a wealthy Mexican named Pedro Garcia (Carlos Bardem), whose son-in-law (Elliot Villar), is messing with his property. The war between the families becomes the focus of the first season of “The Son,” but none of it seems very fresh, despite the great care taken to recreate specific elements of the era and the sweeping Texas vistas.

While the role of Eli probably requires someone with the brazen audacity of “Deadwood’s” Ian McShane, some members of the cast do stand out. British actor Garrett nicely captures Pete’s discomfort with his father’s behavior while also showing how guilt-ridden he is with the ease at which he can kill people. Zach McClarnon, who played the insane, monosyllabic killer on last season’s “Fargo,” has a nice change of pace as the Comanche protector of young Eli. But 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.