There is something satisfyingly old-fashioned about 1923. Photo / @1923official
There is something satisfyingly old-fashioned about 1923. Photo / @1923official
Review by Anita Singh
Anita Singh is an Arts and Entertainment Editor at The Telegraph.
The latest instalment of Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone spin-off reunites us with Dame Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford’s ranch owners in an absorbingly soapy new season.
Winter in Montana is brutal. So brutal that one of the episodes in the second series of 1923 (Paramount+), Taylor Sheridan’s sweeping familysaga and prequel to Yellowstone, is called The Rapist is Winter. If the blizzards and freezing temperatures don’t get you, then the mountain lions and rabid wolves just might. British aristocrat Alexandra, setting out from New York on the long journey west, is warned about the weather. “I’m from England, thank you. I’m no stranger to cold,” she says. “Lady, that ain’t cold,” comes the reply.
Alexandra features in one of the storylines picked up from series one. She is attempting to reach Bozeman to be reunited with her new husband, lion hunter Spencer Dutton. Spencer is making his own way there to save the family ranch which Cara and Jacob (Dame Helen Mirren) and (Harrison Ford) are in danger of losing. The young couple’s journeys broaden the canvas beyond Montana, taking in mafia dons and the indignities of arrival at Ellis Island.
There is something satisfyingly old-fashioned about 1923. It has moments which you just don’t get that often in TV nowadays, such as a hysterical woman being slapped in the face to bring her to her senses (Mirren does the slapping). At times it can be a tad soapy, but overall this is classy storytelling led by two veteran talents.
Brandon Sklenar, as Spencer, brings a touch of heroic Indiana Jones to proceedings – not just with his look, but in the way he delivers a punch. These days, you rarely see the word “masculinity” without the “toxic” prefix, but Sheridan’s series has reclaimed it – men are proper men, and women love them for it.
And let’s just imagine Gen Z going back in time to this. “There’s some good news and some bad news,” Jacob tells a worker who has just been diagnosed with a bleed on the brain. “Good news is, there’s a way to get you better. Doc has to drill a hole, relieve the pressure.” “That’s the good news?” the patient asks. “Compared to the bad news, it is,” says Jacob.
Meanwhile, another character is having rabies jabs to the stomach (for British viewers, this may bring back memories of the 1970s public information film which stopped a generation of children from patting dogs on holiday).
Some of the accents remain criminally bad, particularly Julia Schlaepfer as Alexandra. Why have they cast an American actror as a Brit? Or Jerome Flynn as a Scot, for that matter? Millen’s Irish brogue is inoffensive by comparison. Timothy Dalton wisely sticks to his own accent as the villainous Donald Whitfield, who has a spectacularly unpleasant scene of a sexual nature in episode one, shortly before having a brainwave about inventing skiing holidays. This series is never dull.
