• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, July 9, 2018

If summer is the season for escapism, then the time is right to visit “The Outpost.”

This is a new drama series premiering on the CW Tuesday night about an unidentified primitive realm in an unspecified location in which various tribal groups continually face off against each other, usually with deadly results.

If that sounds a little bit like “Game of Thrones,” then so be it. “The Outpost” can be described as “Game of Thrones” on a budget or “Game of Thrones” lite. “The Outpost” is not the first of these that has come along in recent years, and it likely won’t be the last.

Like all those, “The Outpost” takes place in a fictional time period before the invention of gunpowder. As a result, the murdering and massacring is accomplished with the usual array of handheld weapons, including clubs, axes, knives and swords.

Blood flows in mass quantities and some of it runs black instead of red. This would be the lifeblood of the Blackbloods, one of the tribal groups who are all but wiped out in a village massacre as the series gets underway. 

One of them survives, and 13 years later she is roaming the countryside seeking revenge upon the ruffians who murdered her family and their neighbors.

The hatred for the Blackbloods is not explained, but don’t search too hard for racial and ethnic allegories here. The material isn’t really all that deep.

In any case, this teenage warrior princess is named Talon (played by Jessica Green, pictured above), and she has a “talon” for mayhem. In “Napoleon Dynamite,” Napoleon famously asked a chicken farmer: “Do [your] chickens have large talons?”

I bring this up only because you don’t really hear the word “talon” or “talons” very much in the popular culture. This show and “Napoleon Dynamite” are really the only places where the word has been heard in, oh, 20 years or so.

But I digress. Like teenage girl warriors before her (Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes to mind), Talon has a great ability to overpower, outmaneuver, and of course, kill her foes -- who are almost always bigger, stronger, carry more weapons, and in most cases outnumber her.

How do Buffy, Talon and all the others do this, against such odds and stronger opponents? There is no rational reason, really. Or as my mother used to say when I would question a movie or TV show’s plot points when I was (evidently) a precocious child: It's in the script.

For her, it was the only explanation. And that makes sense for a TV show like “The Outpost,” which depends on Talon surviving all of these encounters with various baddies and ogres about every five to seven minutes or so.

On several occasions in the series premiere, she seems beaten, even mortally wounded -- and yet somehow she lives to see another day and another episode.

If this were any other season but the summer, “The Outpost” could be easily dismissed and even outright ridiculed. But there is something about the summer (particularly in the current heat wave) that inspires a TV critic to take a more forgiving position on a show like this.

The weather is too hot to overthink a TV review or even the new TV show in question. Fortunately, “The Outpost” requires almost no thought at all, and also no effort.

You just turn on your TV at 9 p.m. (Eastern) on Tuesday, find the CW and then just sit there. What could be easier than that?

“The Outpost” premieres Tuesday (July 10) at 9 p.m. Eastern on The CW.