Montana mogul: Kevin Costner plays John Dutton in Yellowstone.
Montana mogul: Kevin Costner plays John Dutton in Yellowstone.
The blockbuster series may be trashy, savage and ignored by the critics - but it embodies the frontier spirit of a conservative country.
Yellowstone is the most popular TV show in America, but somehow also a well-kept secret. When the first episode of its penultimate season was shown on American television a couple of years ago, more than 12 million people watched it live. For context, the first episode of Succession’s penultimate season brought in 1.4 million live viewers and Rivals opened with 940,000 and then steeply declined.
But Yellowstone — back for its final series next week — is not beloved by critics. It hasn’t been showered with awards or hailed excitedly as Shakespeare for our times, partly because the show is undeniably trashy. However, beyond the fighting and the shagging and the drunk cowboys branding each other with cattle prods, Yellowstone does actually have something important to tell us about America today. It’s also splendid fun.
The show’s basic plot is quite similar to Succession’s: the ageing patriarch John Dutton (Kevin Costner) tries to protect a vast, creaking family business, in this case “the Yellowstone”, Montana’s biggest ranch. Dutton frets over which of his feckless children — feral Beth (Kelly Reilly), sneaky Jamie (Wes Bentley), refusenik Kayce (Luke Grimes) or adopted Rip (Cole Hauser) — is best placed not to squander it all when he expires. And he maintains his empire by playing transactional politics and exercising power without restraint.
Central to Yellowstone’s appeal is the escapism offered by Montana’s vast skies and wide open spaces — the soaring hills and lush valleys of the true west, a landscape that at times seems almost too big for its protagonists, demanding regular avowals of awe and respect.
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Yellowstone is also splashy and savage entertainment: cowgirls brawling in Bozeman’s bars, ranch poker games erupting into bourbon-soaked brawls, and regular infusions of the stylised neo-western violence that has been the hallmark of the showrunner Taylor Sheridan’s work (see Sicario, Wind River, Hell or High Water — and do see them, they’re great). In the world of Yellowstone, as Dutton puts it, “all the angels are gone, there’s only devils left”.
Over five seasons since it began in 2018 (as well as two successful prequels, 1883 with Sam Elliott and 1923 with Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford), Yellowstone has ridden — and helped to generate — a country music wave that has swept America. Stars such as Lainey Wilson and Zach Bryan have appeared as troubadours on the show, the latter’s wistful brilliance drawing deserved comparisons to Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash. Driving this wave is a deep sense of nostalgia for small towns and big country where people live pre-21st-century lives far from smartphones or social media.
Unlike many westerns, Yellowstone also does a pretty good job of telling the story of the Native Americans whose home John Dutton’s ancestors wrenched from them. Mistrust runs deep between the ranchers and the Native Americans on their reservation, but they find themselves working awkwardly together at times, resisting the demands of the new money that has poured into Montana and Wyoming in recent decades.
And then there’s Costner, whose portrayal of Dutton, a brutal, adamantine paterfamilias, elevates him into the pantheon of great American screen cowboys: John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood. Like all of the best cowboy protagonists, Costner’s Dutton feels as though he is the last of his kind, clinging to a way of life that is bound to be swept away by the great forces of capital and progress.
In the old westerns it was greedy railroad barons from the east coast carving up the old west, whereas in Yellowstone the villains are Silicon Valley billionaires looking to buy up the new west and package it up for golf enthusiasts. Plus ça change. Only the antihero Dutton stands in their way.
Dutton is a slab of Rocky Mountain manhood in whom the great American traits of Manifest Destiny and rugged individualism are made flesh. As he rampages around Montana on helicopters and horseback, straining his every sinew to fend off the forces of modernity, he embodies the famous old line by William F Buckley, the mid-century American intellectual, who defined a conservative as “someone who stands athwart history yelling ‘stop!’”.
Which speaks to another reason that Yellowstone is so popular: this is a blockbuster US TV show about real conservatives. The show isn’t Trump-coded per se — Dutton would be scathing about the Donald’s gaudy showmanship (although he would still vote for him) — but it does reflect the conservative mindset with unusual depth and humanity. “It’s the one constant in life,” Dutton tells his son Kayce. “You build something worth having, someone’s gonna try to take it.”
All of the show’s protagonists have this sense of being under siege: from coastal elites and coastal money, from liberals judging their customs and demanding they use new language and updated pronouns, from history itself. They all have a sense that their country is slipping away. It’s the same sentiment you’ll hear from Trump voters across the American south and west, resentment towards the huge changes wreaked by technology and globalisation and immigration, none of which they asked for, and yearning for a return to how things were.
This siege mentality has evolved from the history of the frontier itself. American historians have long debated their country’s true nature: is American exceptionalism a product of being the “melting pot” of other cultures? Or perhaps the institution of slavery and the cruelty and beauty of the African-American experience?
I’ve always been taken with the “frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner, the late-19th-century historian who argued that the essence of America was forged by the frontier. The further west Americans went, Turner suggested, the looser their ties became to the ways of the old world. As they settled the frontier, Americans became individualistic, violent, anti-intellectual, egalitarian and fiercely independent. They became, in essence, cowboys.
Yellowstone distils this vision of America perfectly. Its protagonists are not cultured or classbound. Their attachment is to their family, their land and their traditions. As Dutton says to Kayce, in one of his many attempts to impart hard-won wisdom on his errant son: “Learn to be meaner than evil, still love your family and still enjoy a sunrise.”
There was much speculation over whether this final season of Yellowstone would happen, amid rumours that Costner and Sheridan had artistic differences over its ending, and what one imagines will be Dutton’s demise. There are now rumours that it could even have another season, focusing on Beth and the extravagantly violent Rip. In truth Sheridan can spin as much content as he wants out of this cinematic universe, because Yellowstone is more than just a hit show; it’s a way of life.
The final series of Yellowstone is on Neon from November 11.
More great shows that reveal another side of American life
Friday Night Lights
2006 - 2011, Amazon Prime
This showed us the beauty of small-town lives and why it’s not stupid to care passionately about a high school football team.
Sons of Anarchy
2008-14, Disney+
Biker gangs as not just grotty criminal enterprises but itinerant outlaws resisting the civilising demands of society.
Deadwood
2004-6, TVNZ+
A clever and revealing look at the arrival of law and order in the chaotic American west.
The Wire
2002-8, Neon
A show that lifted the lid on American cities and showed the ecosystem of crime from top to bottom, which feeds so much of the country’s soul.
