Which Untamed Character Are You?

Learn More About Untamed

Untamed is a character-driven mystery thriller created by Mark L. Smith and Elle Smith that dropped as a Netflix limited series and quickly became one of the platform's biggest hits of its release window. Eric Bana stars as Kyle Turner, a special agent with the National Park Service's Investigative Services Branch, a real if obscure federal law enforcement division tasked with handling serious crimes on protected federal land. When a woman's body is found on a cliff face in Yosemite National Park, Turner is pulled into an investigation that forces him to confront both a killer who understands the park as intimately as he does and a personal history he has spent years trying to outrun, including the death of his own son.

The show leans hard into its setting, using Yosemite's vastness and beauty as a constant, almost adversarial presence rather than just scenery. Turner is paired with Naya Vasquez, played by Lily Santiago, a former LA homicide cop turned rookie park ranger who brings big-city instincts to a landscape that does not care about jurisdiction or procedure. Their dynamic, an experienced but emotionally shut-down veteran paired with someone still learning the terrain, gives the show its central tension outside of the murder investigation itself. Sam Neill plays Paul Souter, the veteran chief ranger who has spent half his life keeping the park running and serves as both a mentor figure and a steadying presence for Turner. Rosemarie DeWitt plays Jill Bodwin, Turner's ex-wife, whose continued closeness with him despite their divorce says a lot about what actually broke their marriage. Wilson Bethel rounds out the core cast as Shane Maguire, a former army ranger turned wildlife management officer who prefers the isolation of the backcountry to nearly everyone around him.

Critics and audiences responded strongly to the show's willingness to let its mystery breathe, favoring atmosphere and character work over procedural shortcuts, and the six-episode limited series structure meant the story never overstayed its welcome. That reception was strong enough that Netflix moved quickly to renew the show, with Season 2 now filming and reportedly relocating Turner's investigation to a new setting in Hawaii, trading Yosemite's granite cliffs for an entirely different kind of untamed landscape.

Part of what makes Untamed resonate is how firmly it roots each character's professional choices in personal history. Nobody ends up working in one of the most remote corners of the American wilderness by accident, and the show is at its best when it is quietly excavating why each of its characters chose to disappear into a landscape most people only visit on vacation.

Creator Mark L. Smith is no stranger to survival stories set against unforgiving landscapes, having co-written The Revenant before creating American Primeval for Netflix, and that pedigree shows in how seriously Untamed treats its wilderness setting as a character in its own right rather than simply a scenic backdrop for a murder mystery. The production leaned into that authenticity by filming extensively in and around real national park terrain, and the series consulted closely with former park service personnel to keep the procedural details of the fictional Investigative Services Branch grounded in how federal land law enforcement actually operates. That commitment to texture is a big reason the show found an audience well beyond the usual true-crime-adjacent thriller crowd.

Take the quiz above to see which member of the Untamed cast your own instincts most resemble.