The Madison series premiere: Who actually died?

We knew heading into the series premiere of The Madison over at Paramount+ that we would be experiencing a story where grief was in some way front and center. However, there was still an array of questions, with the biggest being who actually died.

Now, we will admit that from the get-go, it felt likely to us that we were going to be seeing the departure of Preston Clyburn, the family patriarch at the center of the series. Even though Kurt Russell was spotted in the trailers as the character, there was always a strange distance between him and everything else that we saw with Stacy and the rest of the family.

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The big twist to us came with the death of Preston’s little brother Paul (Matthew Fox), and also the fact that the two died via a plane crash. This adds more to the central tragedy, given that there is a wider chunk of the family that is gone. It also indicates strongly that moving forward, a lot of the show is going to be about Stacy (Michelle Pfeiffer) and everyone else struggling to move forward.

Of course, The Madison is far from the first series from within the Taylor Sheridan world where characters have died — people were taken to the train station all the time on Yellowstone! What makes this series different is that there is a very real, concentrated effort at this point to make every part of this story feel organic and grounded. There is no ranch to be saved, but there are still people that need saving. You see a lot of that within the first three episodes of the series, and we tend to think that this will also be a huge focus of the story as we move forward, as well.

What did you think about the overall series premiere of The Madison?

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