Yellowstone Empire
A TV saga stakes a claim to an honest portrayal of American history.
I came late to the Yellowstone saga. The Paramount TV series only appeared on my cultural radar late year after reading a Vanity Fair story comparing it with HBO’s Succession (there have been a number of such pieces since). It’s an intriguing juxtaposition. Both shows are about powerful patriarchs in divided families trying to maintain their empires (a baronial Montana ranch in Yellowstone; a Fox-reminiscent network in the case of Succession). And both are the heirs of Dallas (1978-91), a lush primetime adaptation of the soap opera that featured characters viewers loved to hate. (Some of us may remember the frenzy over “Who Shot J.R.?” in that show’s heyday.)
But there are also striking differences as well. One is the kind of attention each show has received. Succession has been a critical darling that has won over a dozen Emmy Awards and has become a fairly standard point of reference in contemporary elite culture. Its new episodes generate weekly viewership that can be measured in the hundreds of thousands. Yellowstone has won a single Emmy for its production design. It generates weekly viewership measured in the millions—in some cases over 10 million, which is particularly impressive when one considers this is not primarily a broadcast or cable show, but rather one that relies on streaming subscriptions.
To be clear: there are any number of reasons to dislike either or both shows. But it would be hard to argue against the notion that both represent the highest quality programming the TV industry knows how to offer. Both series feature good writing and excellent acting. Both show careful scrutiny for verisimilitude in recreating their respective worlds. Both use fictional scenarios to raise compelling questions about contemporary national life. And both tend toward melodrama—perhaps inevitable in series that need to sustain themselves over multiple episodes and multiple seasons. The real difference between the shows, and who’s likely to watch them, is ideological.
I’ll confess I got tired of Succession after a couple of seasons. All the major characters are awful—never simply awful, and never beyond the realm of some human sympathy. But the whole point of the show, whose essence is satirical, comes down not merely to a critique of capitalism (certainly not something hard to find in any number of precincts of popular culture), but what amounts to a more specifically progressive denunciation of it: everything you’ve suspected of American corporate life —venality, corruption, bottomless depths of craven behavior, you name it — is offered not as a revelation of what we presumably already know, but rather as a vehicle for complacency. It fosters a kind of self-congratulation: I’m not that bad, and I’m glad don’t live in that world of wealth and privilege that immiserates rather than emancipates. It’s a bit pat that way.
Yellowstone is more complicated. It’s also more expansive. The show’s creator, Taylor Sheridan—director of the terrific 2016 western Hell or High Water as well as the 2015 thriller Sicario—has created spinoffs that include the prequel 1883 and the soon-to-premiere 1923—that offer a literally and figuratively panoramic inland-centered world that fans have dubbed the “Taylorverse.” (In addition to writing and directing, Sheridan also appears as an actor in Yellowstone, which stars Kevin Costner as the contemporary patriarch of the multigenerational Dutton family.) Even though the show has generated more popular appeal, which one might be tempted to correlate with simplicity, the world it offers is ambiguous in its portrayal of conflicts among and within characters.
In the contemporary academy, where the western genre is regarded with disdain, the term of art used to denote the western white settlement of the North American continent is “settler colonialism.” What’s interesting about the Yellowstone saga is that it implicitly accepts this description. There’s never any doubt that the white characters you meet on these shows, regardless of how self-conscious they are about it, are engaged in a process of imperial conquest. They’re also trying to brave the elements in a beautiful but harsh frontier, forge romantic bonds, raise children, and pursue any number of other personal and spiritual objectives. And so are the Indians—among them Comanche, Crow, and Arapahoe. All these people can rise to heights of nobility and plunge into depths of brutality. They kill, compromise, and marry. They find common ground, fight for what they think is theirs, and compromise as needed. The women sometimes resist the gendered roles into which they are cast, and they sometimes embrace them. But there’s never any doubt that some of them are tougher and stronger and better than their male counterparts, and that some of them are worse. That goes for rich folks and poor folks, too.
I don’t want to go overboard on this. The saga unfolds from the Duttons’ point of view, and there are any number of objections one can raise about this character or that scenario, or a given premise. (I find myself wondering how long before the scabrous iconoclasm of Beth Dutton, played by Kelly Reilly, turns into caricature.) Shows like these tend to date quickly. But considering the present moment in which the saga is unfolding, the main impression one has of the Taylorverse is its refreshing candor.
Objections to Sheridan’s vision of the world are more likely to come from his unapologetic libertarianism. His characters are not incapable of cooperation and generosity, but look with suspicion at any kind of formally organized collective action, which as likely as not takes the form of coercion masquerading as benevolence. “If any of them has the word ‘alliance’ in it, cancel it,” John Dutton, the newly elected governor of Montana—a job he has taken on largely as a way of saving his embattled ranch—says of meetings his chief of staff has scheduled for him. Such characters love trees but hate environmentalists. (Though as per the show’s ethos, there is one partial exception, Summer Higgins, played by Piper Perabo.) John Dutton’s ancestor James Dutton (Tim McGraw) will help Slavic immigrants make their way west with him, as long as its clear he’s not answerable to anybody—except his headstrong daughter Elsa (Isabel May), whose fierce independence plays a large role in the family’s mythology.
Whatever one’s reservations about the Yellowstone saga, there’s one aspect of these shows that saves them from the kind of implicit complacency one sees in Succession: a knowledge that even History’s victors—by which I mean people who inhabit the world believing they embody the prevailing common sense—live on borrowed time. This goes as much for the white privileged as it does tribal Native American seniors who have to deal with challengers from below. (Restless braves seeking to make war has always been one of the great sources of friction among indigenous people; in this case, one of the most aggressive corporate warriors happens to be a woman.) At one point in 1883 a kindly Crow named Spotted Eagle—cleverly, he’s played by Graham Greene, the same actor who plays a scary criminal in Yellowstone—steers the Dutton family to the turf it will call home. But he also warns James that it will only be his family’s for seven generations—which by my count brings us to 2023. The Dutton family’s enemies are at least as much the coastal gentrifiers who want to construct airports and vacation homes as it is the casino-building Indians who at times find it convenient to ally with them. Figuratively speaking, the Duttons are the last of the Mohicans. Sooner or later, so are we all.
Looking for a stocking stuffer? Check out my new book 1980: America’s Pivotal Year.
Note: I’ll be taking a break for the next two weeks. Merry Christmas, et. al., to all, and to all good days and nights. -J.C.