With Kevin Costner’s early departure, has Yellowstone lost its way?
By Tom Ryan
Along with its offspring, Yellowstone (Stan) has blitzed programming schedules over the past few years. And it looks likely to continue, albeit in different guises, over the next few, even if the story of life on the majestic Montana ranch is set to end in a fortnight.
So far, there have been two prequels, the outstanding 1883 (Paramount+, Stan) and the uneven 1923 (Paramount+), whose second season is in production. There’s now a third, 1944, in the planning stages. And a sequel is on the way too, entitled The Madison, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, featuring some of the characters from Yellowstone, and dealing with a Manhattan family’s move to the Madison River Valley in southwest Montana.
Yellowstone: the foundations of a TV empire.Credit: Stan
A proposed spin-off, 6666, featuring Jimmy (Jefferson White) and fiancee Emily (Kathryn Kelly), supporting players during the original series, is on hold. But co-creator, producer, regular writer, occasional director and bit player Taylor Sheridan, who built this TV empire using Yellowstone as its sturdy foundation, promises that it’s going to happen. “Just be patient,” he’s reported to have recently told executives eagerly awaiting news of its completion.
But with only two episodes to come in the fifth season, Paramount is about to bid farewell to the powerful modern-day western that has spawned them all. Bizarrely, as is the way with the tall poppy syndrome, some pundits began to feast on the carcass even before viewing the final batch of episodes, proclaiming that it had lost its way. But has it?
Right now, three questions remain, and they’re connected. Has Yellowstone been able to sustain its early promise as a state-of-the-nation drama? How’s it going to end? And has Kevin Costner’s premature departure undermined its momentum? He apparently withdrew to give his full attention to the ambitious four-film project, Horizon: An American Saga, for which he’s the co-producer, director, co-writer and lead actor (Chapter One, which is better than its notices so far might suggest, is on Stan; Chapter Two arrives in 2025).
Kevin Costner: has his premature departure diminished Yellowstone?Credit: Stan
Yellowstone’s opening season is certainly its best, the set-up irresistible. All the characters (as well as those in the prequels) are defined by their connections to the land around them, and much of the action pivots on what happens on the ranch owned and managed by Costner’s character, John Dutton, and located in the appropriately named Paradise Valley. The series’ wider concern, however, is rural America’s way of life post-white settlement.
Yellowstone shares one of its boundaries with the Broken Rock Indian Reservation, presided over by shrewd Native American chairman Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) and his spiritual advisor Mo (Moses Brings Plenty). On the other side, a property developer (Danny Huston) represents so-called “progress”: with big-money backing, he’s planning to build a casino. The shifting relationships between the adversaries and the new arrivals on the scene throughout the series ensure that, initially at least, no-one ever knows exactly where their opponents stand.
The politics of what’s at stake here are unmistakable and the perspective that emerges provides a clear view of where Sheridan’s sympathies lie. In the first place, he’s strongly drawn to the romantic pioneering spirit and cowboy ethos that Dutton represents and which underpin the establishment of the ranch.
At the same time, he’s keenly aware of the connections between that way of thinking and the idea of Manifest Destiny which became America’s rationale for its seizure of Native American land and the genocide it perpetrated against its original owners.
This underlying tension persists throughout the series, primarily filtered through the developing relationship between Dutton and Rainwater. “I’m the opposite of progress,” Rainwater tells his neighbour. “I’m the past catching up with you.”
Gil Birmingham plays Rainwater in Yellowstone: the past is catching up.Credit: AP
The series is at its fiery best when these issues occupy the foreground and Sheridan doesn’t keep his pistol holstered. Soon after Dutton’s favoured son, Kayce (Luke Grimes), marries Monica (Kelsey Asbille), a child of the Reservation, she gets a job lecturing at Montana State University.
“What you know of history is a dominant culture’s justification for its actions,” she tells her first class early in season two. “I don’t talk about that. I’ll teach you about what happened to my people and yours.”
From the start, Sheridan was also concerned that Dutton and his crew shouldn’t be mistaken for good guys. When the first season was launched, he even suggested that a good way to think about Yellowstone would be to wonder “what if The Godfather took place on the largest ranch in Montana?”
Yellowstone has been at its weakest when its political agenda and its ambivalence about Dutton’s modus operandi recede into the background and the haggling between his offspring and the arrival of other bad guys on the scene take over.
This is the fumbled play which often brings down long-running series: perhaps years in the planning, they burst on to the scene, full of ideas and energy, but then struggle to maintain their momentum, diverting their attention to what happens next to the characters and seemingly forgetting what made them so effective in the first place.
To varying degrees, this is what makes much of season four and the early stages of season five a bit of a slog. So the putdown pundits mightn’t be entirely amiss in their assessment. Costner’s departure in the middle of the final season hasn’t helped, leaving a gaping hole at the centre of the story and reducing the gravity of the unsettling moral drama at its heart.
Nevertheless, whether compelled by this unexpected development or planned all along, Yellowstone appears to be in the process of excavating the political issues that gave it so much oomph in its early stages, which raises more questions.
Are the Duttons really going to lose control of the land that’s been part of the family heritage since their ancestors, James and Margaret (Tim McGraw and Faith Hill), lay down roots there at the end of 1883? Are the reminders of mortality that touch everyone in the most recent episode a warning of what lies ahead for the family? Will the developers (whose current boss is played by Jacki Weaver) finally triumph? Or will the land finally be returned to the progeny of its original owners?
According to key cast member Grimes, even without Costner everything that’s about to happen in the series was planned from the start. “It’s the ending that Taylor always had in mind,” he said last month. So perhaps what Crow elder Spotted Eagle (played by the imposing Graham Greene) tells James Dutton at the end of 1883 is an indication of what’s to come? Perhaps the key to the ending of the Yellowstone epic was written in the prequel that was made after it began (but perhaps conceived before)?
“Know this,” Spotted Eagle warns the worn-out James at the end of his post-Civil War cross-country journey with his family. “In seven generations, my people will rise up and take the land back from you.” Monica and Kayce’s newborn in Yellowstone’s first season – named Tate and played by Brecken Merrill – is the first Dutton of that generation.
An ending in line with Spotted Eagle’s prophesy is virtually unimaginable in the real world. But despite Rainwater’s apparent concession of defeat a couple of episodes ago, maybe Sheridan’s fictional universe can find its way to a satisfying resolution that incorporates it.
Yellowstone screens on Stan.
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