April Blair builds ensemble dramas around romance and family trouble. The appeal is clear, but Ransom Canyon leaves us unconvinced that attractive people and complicated relationships are enough to keep a series going.
Fi1m perspective
In Ransom Canyon (2025), an attractive cowboy with difficulties is reason enough to begin a story, though he is liable to take his time addressing them. April Blair puts romantic complications at the centre of this Western drama, adapted from Jodi Thomas’s novels. We enjoyed the chemistry, then grew impatient because the thin writing gave us too little reason to care what happened next. That is our reservation about Blair’s approach here: she establishes an appealing situation without making the people in it interesting enough to sustain it.
Her early film work includes Monte Carlo (2011), co-written with director Tom Bezucha. In television, she created Jane by Design (2012), about a teenager balancing school and a fashion internship, and All American (2018), following a high school football player. Those settings give an ensemble somewhere to go and something to do besides fall in love. Her writing credits also include You (2018) and Wednesday (2022).
Those last two series are the more rewarding watches among the work we have reviewed, though their strengths should not all be credited to an individual writer. Jenna Ortega’s severity gives Wednesday its comedy, while Penn Badgley and the voice-over make You’s treatment of courtship as surveillance entertaining and uncomfortable. Their weaknesses are instructive, too: the school mystery is less distinctive than its heroine, and the stalker thriller sometimes rushes past its more interesting questions.
Ransom Canyon gives us a clearer basis for judging Blair as a creator, and it is a mixed one. She brings mystery and soap-opera complications into the romance, but these cannot make up for predictable plotting or the tiresome division of emotional labour. The handsome setting is a pleasure; the series asks it to do too much of the work. Try You if an uncomfortable stalker thriller appeals, or Wednesday for Ortega’s comedy; approach the cowboy romances with patience.
Biography
April Blair is an American screenwriter and television producer. She began working in the industry in the mid-1990s and has written for both film and television.
Her film credits include the screenplay for Monte Carlo (2011) and teleplays for Lemonade Mouth (2011) and Private Valentine: Blonde & Dangerous (2008). On television she has written episodes of Hart of Dixie, Reign, The Shannara Chronicles, You, the 2021 revival of Gossip Girl and Wednesday (2022).
Blair created and executive-produced the series Jane by Design (2012) and All American (2018). She later developed and executive-produced the Netflix series Ransom Canyon (2025–26).
