The Critics · On Television
The Quiet Show About Ocala That Refuses to Explain Itself
A four-episode drama about a horse farm that mistrusts its own dialogue — and is better for it.
The show, which arrived this week on a streaming service I refuse, on principle, to name, is four episodes long, and each episode is approximately forty-three minutes. In those one hundred and seventy-two minutes, there are perhaps twenty pages of dialogue. The rest is horses, weather, and the sound of a screen door.
This is not, to be clear, a criticism. The show is set on a horse farm outside Ocala, and the farm, in the show, is treated with the seriousness that a farm actually requires. When a character speaks — which happens, on average, once every eleven minutes — it is because there is nothing else, at that moment, that a person could reasonably do.
I watched all four episodes in one sitting, which I do not recommend. What I recommend is watching them the way one used to watch television: one episode a week, on a Sunday, with the phone in another room. The show will reward you. It will also, I suspect, teach you something about the value of not filling every silence with a sentence.