A Madison Avenue Socialite Starts Over in... Madison, Montana?!

Eight years ago, when my son, Luke, moved to Silicon Valley for an engineering position, Neil, my husband of 38 years, drove cross-country with him to help get Luke settled. They made several stops along the way; one of note was South Dakota. When Neil arrived home, he couldn’t stop talking about how he loved it. It was so beautiful. He wanted to move there. As a born and bred New Yorker, I wished him well on his next chapter in the Midwest. (FYI: He has yet to relocate.)

Because that’s where my head’s at, I struggle to relate to Michelle Pfeiffer’s character, the self-proclaimed New York “city-girl” Stacy Clyburn, in the Paramount+ show “The Madison,” Taylor Sheridan’s ten-thousandth series on the air.

This time, the prolific creator has mined Manhattan for a storyline. Think the 1960’s classic “Green Acres,” except instead of a comedy about a wealthy NYC couple transplanting to Hooterville, it’s a drama with the Clyburns moving to Sheridan’s go-to state, Montana.

It is not a “Yellowstone” spinoff, but it might as well be. Same mountains. Same type of log cabin-esque manse replete with porch and rocking chairs.

Although instead of ranch wars (“You stole my cows!”), Stacy and her two adult daughters, her son-in-law, and her granddaughters make a new life in the Madison River Valley to process grief, seek healing, and reconnect following the death of her husband Preston (Kurt Russell).

The Clyburns’ life in Manhattan is portrayed as rich yet unhappy because rich and happy people are too much for most of us to deal with. Although their marriage is enviable, Preston hates the business that provides his live-large income, Stacy is bored with charity work, and the women she does it alongside. Their daughters and granddaughters are, of course, brats because, well, they’re rich. Then one of Stacy’s daughters gets mugged, and no one, not even the police, helps her. (FYI: Once, on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 57^th Street, a necklace I was wearing broke, and a group of strangers stopped to help me pick up the beads. I think someone would have helped a victim of assault up off the sidewalk.)

Sheridan is trying to show how miserable our city is compared to Montana, where everyone helps everyone—even people they don’t know.

Stacy, with her fam in tow, go to Big Sky Country to identify Preston’s body, then decide to stay in the place he loved to feel close to him—and yes, Sheridan takes every opportunity to make fun of how inept city folk are. The outhouse is a running gag, as is the fact that their neighbors are snakes and bears. Oh my.

When two family members get stung by a hornet and act like they’ve been stabbed on the subway, a local explains that a little baking soda on the swelling will cure what ails them. Stacy tells her granddaughter when they go flyfishing for the first time: “Men do it drunk, how hard could it be?” (I know an avid fly fisherman. It’s a skill and not easy.)

I firmly believe that a healthy dose of fresh Middle America air could do anyone good, but as a native New Yorker, I know Stacy, after a brief head-clearing sojourn, could figure out the rest of her life from here.

After all, isn’t NYC the place where people come to reinvent themselves?

If she can’t bear to remain in her mansion in the sky, which has a bathroom that is larger than my first apartment, Stacy could always downsize to a two-bed with the second bedroom earmarked for when her granddaughters visit. She could eschew caviar/filet mignon luncheons, which seek donations, so the food insecure might talk to nutritionists (an actual scene from the show), to volunteer at a food bank as Mia Farrow’s character did at the end of the movie “Alice.” Instead of attending The Met Gala, which she and Preston made fun of in one of their last phone conversations, she could become a patron of the arts for up-and-coming downtown theater companies. And if she’s looking for a way to fill her time productively, she could always get a job like Jackie Kennedy Onassis did, or at least work gratis at one of our many museums.

I would never debate Taylor Sheridan, a very successful writer-producer as well as a prolific creator, about cowboys, life in the Great Plains State, or someone’s reason for building a house with no indoor plumbing, so if he’s going to tell me and the rest of the country who watch his show what it’s like to live here, he might want to do a little more research. New York is many things: loud, expensive, occasionally infuriating, but a place where you can create a new life that is as big as Montana.

Lorraine Duffy Merkl is the author of the novel “The Last Single Woman In New York City.”