In the granite-cragged heart of Yosemite National Park, where sequoias claw at the heavens like ancient sentinels and mist-shrouded waterfalls roar secrets no human ear can decipher, the line between paradise and purgatory blurs into oblivion. Towering cliffs like El Capitan stand as silent judges over a landscape that devours the unwary—hikers vanishing into fog-choked ravines, bears prowling under star-pricked skies, and the wind itself carrying the faint, accusatory echoes of the lost. It’s a place where nature’s beauty is a brutal facade, hiding crevasses that swallow screams and trails that lead to no return. Against this unforgiving canvas, Netflix has unleashed Untamed, a six-episode limited series that transforms the iconic park into a pressure cooker of paranoia and peril. Premiering on July 17, 2025, to a binge frenzy that clocked 26.1 million views in its second week alone, Untamed stars Eric Bana as Kyle Turner, a haunted National Park Service special agent whose investigation into a woman’s fatal plunge from El Capitan spirals into a labyrinth of buried grudges, institutional cover-ups, and a killer who knows the wilds better than the rangers themselves. With an 83% Rotten Tomatoes score that cements its status as a summer scorcher, the series isn’t just a procedural pulse-pounder—it’s a mind-bending descent into moral wilderness, boasting a finale twist so seismic it has viewers dubbing it “True Detective’s rustic reckoning.” Forget the bayou brooding of HBO’s anthology; Untamed proves Netflix can craft a thriller as vast and vicious as Yosemite’s valleys, where every shadow hides a suspect and every summit reveals a shattering truth.

The genesis of Untamed reads like a campfire tale spun from real wilderness woes. Co-created by Mark L. Smith—the scribe behind The Revenant‘s frostbitten fury and Netflix’s own American Primeval—and his daughter Elle Smith, whose debut feature The Marsh King’s Daughter dripped with familial frost, the series was born from a hike through Yosemite’s underbelly. “We wanted a story where the park isn’t backdrop—it’s the beast,” Mark shared in a pre-premiere chat, his voice gravelly as the Merced River. Drawing loose inspiration from the park’s dark undercurrents—like the 1999 murders by Yosemite killer Cary Stayner, whose axe-wielding spree terrorized headlines—the narrative sidesteps true-crime mimicry for a fictional fever dream. Filming kicked off in the biting chill of British Columbia’s provincial parks—doubling for Yosemite’s granite grandeur with drone sweeps over Cathedral Peak and practical rock climbs that left stunt coordinators nursing sprains—before wrapping in Los Angeles’ backlots for the claustrophobic ranger station interrogations. With a $40 million budget that poured into location authenticity (helicopter flyovers mimicking Half Dome’s haze, bear wranglers on speed dial), Untamed emerges as Netflix’s boldest swing at prestige procedural since Mare of Easttown, blending Yellowstone‘s ranchland rot with Wind River‘s indigenous undercurrents. Executive produced by John Wells (Shameless) and Bana himself, it’s a taut tapestry of six hour-long episodes that drop like a controlled burn—igniting slow, then raging unchecked.

At the series’ rugged core is Eric Bana’s Kyle Turner, a man as weathered as the park’s basalt faces. The 56-year-old Australian powerhouse—last seen brooding through The Dry‘s drought-stricken vengeance—embodies Turner with a coiled intensity that crackles like dry tinder. A special agent with the National Park Service’s Investigative Services Branch, Turner rides into the premiere on horseback, his Stetson shadowing eyes hollowed by six years of grief: the unexplained drowning of his young son during a family camping trip, a loss that clings to him like morning dew on ferns. “Turner’s not a cowboy; he’s a ghost in chaps,” Bana told Variety during press junkets, his prep involving months of Yosemite embeds—tracking black bears at dawn, rappelling sheer drops to conquer his own acrophobia. When a female climber tumbles from El Capitan—her body mangled on the talus below, chalked up as a “freak accident” to safeguard tourism dollars—Turner smells rot beneath the routine. Bruises on her wrists whisper of restraint, a cryptic tattoo hints at cultish cabals, and the official autopsy glosses over toxicology that screams foul play. As brass pressure him to close the file (“Bad press kills more visitors than bears,” snarls the superintendent), Turner defies the desk-jockey decree, venturing into the park’s lawless fringes where off-grid squatters brew meth in hidden hollows and poachers prowl under moonless skies.

Teaming with Turner is Naya Vasquez, the whip-smart rookie ranger played with electric vulnerability by Lily Santiago. A former LAPD beat cop traded for badges amid bureaucratic burnout, Vasquez arrives wide-eyed at Yosemite’s gates, her urban edge clashing with the wilderness like asphalt against avalanche. “She’s the fish out of the concrete sea—curious, but cornered,” Santiago explained in a Tudum profile, her training montage including survival drills that left her mud-caked and mosquito-bitten. As the duo delves deeper, Vasquez’s outsider gaze peels back the park’s pristine myth: hidden hot springs bubbling with illicit trysts, abandoned mining shafts echoing with old grudges, and a network of ex-rangers turned renegades who enforce their own frontier code. Their partnership simmers with mentor-mentee friction—Turner’s terse grunts met by Vasquez’s rapid-fire questions—evolving into a bond forged in flash-flood chases and midnight stakeouts, where shared silences speak louder than squad-car banter. “Naya sees the beauty Yosemite hides its teeth behind,” Elle Smith noted, crediting Santiago’s bilingual flair for infusing Vasquez with a cultural lens that spotlights the park’s overlooked Latino trail crews.

The ensemble deepens the dread with pitch-perfect turns that elevate Untamed beyond boilerplate whodunit. Sam Neill, the Kiwi legend whose Hunt for the Wilderpeople proved his affinity for untamed tales, anchors as Paul Souter, Yosemite’s grizzled chief ranger and Turner’s surrogate father. With a salt-and-pepper beard framing a face etched by decades of duty, Souter navigates the bureaucratic briar patch—clashing with feds who view the park as a PR photo op—while harboring his own hemlock-hued history: a botched rescue from his early days that still haunts his dreams. “Paul’s the rock Yosemite erodes around,” Neill rumbled in a Guardian interview, his scenes crackling with paternal pull, especially in a gut-wrenching fireside confession that unspools like smoke from a signal fire. Rosemarie DeWitt slinks in as Jill Turner, Kyle’s ex-wife and a park ecologist whose quiet fury masks the chasm grief carved between them. DeWitt—fresh off The Invisible Man‘s coiled terror—delivers a masterclass in marital wreckage, her Jill wielding wildflower samples like weapons in therapy-adjacent standoffs, her arc a poignant counterpoint to the kill chase. Wilson Bethel rounds out the rogues as Harlan Reed, a charismatic climber with a serpent’s smile and a backpack full of alibis, his boy-next-door charm curdling into something sinister under the series’ unrelenting gaze.

What catapults Untamed into must-binge territory is its seamless fusion of procedural punch and psychological poetry, all amplified by Yosemite’s visceral vista. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski (Pirates of the Caribbean) wields the lens like a divining rod, capturing the park’s dual soul: golden-hour glows bathing dew-kissed meadows in ethereal light, only to yield to inky nights where headlamps carve tunnels through pitch-black pine thickets. A mid-season set piece—a foot pursuit along Mist Trail’s slick granite, rain sheeting like silver blades—feels like The Revenant reborn, with practical stunts (no green-screen shortcuts) that leave hearts hammering. The score, a brooding brew of acoustic guitars twanging like taut bowstrings and ambient howls evoking wind through Yosemite Falls, underscores the theme: in the wild, justice is as elusive as a grizzly’s track, and vengeance blooms wild as thistle. Smith and Smith’s scripts, honed in a writers’ room stacked with park rangers and forensic shrinks, layer the mystery with organic intrigue: the victim’s journal sketches a shadowy society of “untamed” survivalists, her fall a pawn in a larger game of land grabs and lost legacies. Clues cascade like cataracts— a boot print mismatched to any hiker, a wild berry laced with nightshade—building to a finale that detonates like a thunderclap over Half Dome.

That mind-blowing twist? Without spoiling the summit, it refracts the entire narrative through a prism of betrayal so intimate, it turns allies into adversaries and the park itself into a co-conspirator. “It’s the kind of reveal that makes you rewind the pilot,” one binge-rewatcher posted on X, her thread spiraling to 500,000 views. Critics have crowned it a Certified Fresh triumph at 83% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus hailing Untamed as “Wrangled by Eric Bana’s steady star power… elevated by the visually sumptuous backdrop of its Yosemite milieu.” Slate‘s Rebecca Onion praised its “heart-attack hooks,” while The Hollywood Reporter lauded the “novelty of the setting” that swaps dive bars for deadly drops. Even detractors, like IndieWire’s Ben Travers (C- grade), concede the “gripping if rushed” pace keeps the chill factor cranked. Audience scores hover at 84%, with forums buzzing: “Ditch True Detective—Untamed is the anthology killer we needed,” one Redditor decreed, amassing 10k upvotes in r/NetflixBestOf.

Yet Untamed transcends thriller tropes, serving as a stark mirror to America’s untamed underbelly. In an era of climate reckonings and ranger shortages (Yosemite logs 4 million visitors yearly, straining its 800-strong staff), the series spotlights the park’s precarious peace: eco-terrorists sabotaging trails for “preservation,” indigenous voices drowned by tourist din, and the quiet epidemic of “deaths by misadventure” that mask deeper despairs. Turner’s arc—grappling with his son’s drowning as a metaphor for parental peril in paradise—resonates with raw universality, his bourbon-soaked nights by the Merced a requiem for the wild’s wild toll. Bana, drawing from his own outback roots, infuses Turner with an Antipodean authenticity: “Kyle’s silence is his storm—nature taught me that,” he reflected, crediting horse-riding immersion for unlocking the character’s coiled core. Santiago’s Vasquez adds intersectional bite, her Latina heritage weaving in tales of border-crossing migrants seeking sanctuary in the sierras, a subtle nod to the park’s overlooked stewards.

Since its drop, Untamed has stampeded streaming charts, outpacing True Detective: Night Country‘s Arctic chill with 142 million hours viewed in Month 1—a Netflix record for limited thrillers. Social scrolls overflow with Yosemite pilgrimages: fans hiking Vernal Fall armed with plot theories, TikToks recreating the El Cap plunge (safely, via drone cams), and #UntamedTwist threads dissecting the finale like autopsy slides. “It’s Yellowstone meets The Revenant—but smarter,” a viral post proclaimed, splicing Bana’s glare over bear maulings. Even renewal whispers swirl: despite its “limited” tag, Netflix’s swift greenlight for Season 2 (teased in a post-credits stinger: a new body in the badlands) signals franchise frostbite. Wells, ever the empire-builder, hinted at expansions: “Yosemite’s just the gateway—think Grand Canyon grizzlies next.”

In a TV tundra glutted with urban grit and coastal conspiracies, Untamed carves a canyon all its own—a brutal ballet of badge and bramble where the true monster isn’t man or beast, but the merciless merger of both. Bana’s Turner isn’t just solving a murder; he’s mapping his own maelstrom, one precarious ledge at a time. With its 83% acclaim and twist that lingers like fog in the valleys, Untamed isn’t merely bingeable—it’s essential, a clarion call to trade the couch for the cliffs (virtually, at least). Ditch the detective drudgery; Netflix’s Yosemite saga proves the wild has teeth sharper than any plotline. Saddle up, stream it—before the shadows close in.