The Son with Pierce Brosnan follows oil tycoon’s fortunes

Pick of the Day: The Son SBS, 11pm; streaming on SBS On Demand.

Pierce Brosnan in The Son on SBS.

Pick of the Day: The Son SBS, 11pm; streaming on SBS On Demand.

Irish actor Pierce Brosnan, most famous for his four outings as James Bond in the late 1990s and early 2000s, stars here as Eli McCullough in an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel, The Son. The 10-episode drama, which is screening weekly on SBS and streaming on SBS On Demand, traces his character’s transformation from good-natured boy to violent patriarch of a Texan ranching and oil dynasty.

“He is a man who has seen a lot of death, seen many, many families die — he lost a few families himself,” says Brosnan. “He saw the savage brutality of the demise of his mother and his sister, his life is torn apart savagely by the Comanche, and then he becomes a Comanche. And then he becomes a kind of heroic figure to his own self, he’s very much aware of his own place in time.”

The series opens with a flashback to these events, then forward to McCullough and his extended clan.

“That’s where he finds his refuge out there on the McCullough ranch in the middle of nowhere. And looking for the oil, looking for the Holy Grail, you know, is the next step in his life and where the future is going, because he’s a very modern man within his years and within his time,” says Brosnan.

He hastens to add, though, that all of McCullough’s dreams will ultimately prove futile.

“Man will devour man, everything passes, everything falls apart,” he says.

But that is not to say it is a depressing series; Brosnan sees the acceptance of life’s futility as liberating.

“Live your life, you know, because we’ll all be forgotten one way or the other,” he says.

“And so The Son is kind of big, epic, but lyrical and beautiful at the same time. It has a heart. It has a soul. It has a deep investigation of the times by (author) Philipp Meyer and one hopes that it will entertain.”

The Son was recently renewed by the AMC network for a second season.