Somewhere in the crimson-mesa’d expanse of Texas Hill Country, in a town where shirtless men perform interpretive fence repair and every third resident is nursing a will-they-won’t-they that predates the Macarena, one woman stands alone. Not by choice, but by neglect. I am speaking, of course, of Angie O’Grady, and I am asking the writers of Ransom Canyon a simple question: How did this woman hurt you?
Look at the evidence. Season 2 gave Angie more to do — she went from two episodes in season one to five, which was supposed to be a promotion. The writers looked at Angie, decided she deserved additional screen time, and then spent all of it deploying her as a anthropomorphic hug for her sister Quinn, who is busy juggling two suitors and a country music festival like some kind of East Dillon Bachelorette. Meanwhile, Angie holds the coat. Angie offers the wise word. Angie is there for emotional support when Quinn’s mother rolls into town doing a bad Patricia Clarkson impression of Patricia Clarkson.
And it’s not just neglect. It’s cruelty. The show told us she was available. It’s in her character description, plain as day — Angie’s husband cheated on her, so she is “back on the market for romance.” Back on the market! They put up the sign. They opened the shop. They stocked no inventory.
Not that it didn’t have options on the shelf. More than once, the season darts its gaze toward Sheriff Dan Brigman — a single father, a lawman, a man with a cowboy hat — and seems to think, for the length of a single meaningful glance, oh, these two. An unattached sheriff and an available sister in a town of maybe four hundred people. And then the show loses its nerve. It does not follow through. It does not follow through even a little. The camera lingers, the possibility flickers, and the writers change the subject like Brad Pitt being asked about his kids.
Worse — so much worse! — is that they let her go shopping and then robbed her at the register. There is a scene, a real scene, in which Clarkson’s Claire attempts to set Angie up with a beefcake cop. A gift! A rancher-adjacent man in uniform, hand-delivered by her own mother! And then, in the finale, that same mother kisses him herself and invites him out to her new place. Patricia Clarkson’s Claire O’Grady looked at her freshly divorced daughter, produced an eligible man, and then ate him alive in front of her. This is not a love triangle. This is a heist. The one time the writers let a plausible suitor wander into Angie’s orbit, they had her own mother intercept him at the door.
The cruelty!
I would rally around her son, except I have watched all eight episodes of this season and cannot produce evidence that this child exists. The internet assures me Angie has a son named Tim, a wide receiver from Season 1 who spent his screen time shadowing a boy the show has since written off the face of the earth. So even Angie’s motherhood is a dangling thread nobody’s picking back up. The woman has a cheating ex, a phantom teenager, a sheriff who keeps almost happening, a man stolen by her own mother, and a sister absorbing every drop of romantic plot within a fifty-mile radius. What she does not have — what she has never had, what this pitiless series refuses to grant her — is one single decent rancher to call her own.
Season 3, I am begging you. There are shirtless men everywhere. Spare one. Spare Angie one. May God have mercy on her loins.
