(CNN) Once a primetime staple, westerns are currently few and far between. AMC seeks to rectify that, awkwardly, with its new show "The Son," an adaptation of Philipp Meyer's bestselling novel that feels like a one-trick pony -- most notable for a slightly miscast Pierce Brosnan riding back onto TV in the central role.

A replacement for Sam Neill, who dropped out of the project, Brosnan plays Eli McCullough, the grizzled patriarch of a grand Texas family in 1915. "The era of the cattle baron is over," he tells his granddaughter, a point reinforced by the rickety, new-fangled cars in which they slowly motor around.

"The Son" oscillates between two timeframes, beginning with Eli's abduction by the Comanche as a teenager in 1849. (Yes, do the math, and Brosnan, who looks plenty good for a guy in his early 60s, is distractingly supposed to be nearly 80.)

The young Eli is subjected to all manner of abuse, but also taken under the wing of an older warrior ("Fargo's" Zahn McClarnon), who somewhat cryptically teaches him the ways of survival. How he wound up back in the white man's world remains a mystery through the episodes available for preview, but the underlying point is clearly that the skills Eli mastered during that ordeal prepared and informed him for the challenges of the present, which include tensions along the Mexican border.

The main problem is that very little of what happens during the 20th-century sequences proves especially interesting, beginning with the rather nondescript assortment of family members, neighbors and friends that surround Eli. If this is supposed to be a big "Dallas"-style epic filled with family intrigue and hoisted petticoats, it's as if they conjured a slightly wizened J.R. but nobody else of much note.

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