Yellowstone is a show about how if you own a ranch, you have to kill a lot of people (and/or about how working on a ranch builds character)
The natural question, if you haven’t seen Yellowstone, is: Well, what is it about? The answer is: It’s about about 15 or 16 separate things, depending on the episode. (Really, there’s always a lot going on.) For the purposes of this overview, though, we’re going to narrow the show down to its two most popular versions, which are the equivalent of two very different shows, randomly mashed together into one.
First things first: Yellowstone, created by writer Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water, Sicario, Wind River) and John Linson (who only wrote the first episode of Yellowstone), is not about Yellowstone National Park. It’s set near the park, and the characters occasionally go there for iconic, tense encounters with wolves. But most of the action revolves around the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch in Montana. In the show’s plot, the ranch is the largest contiguous ranch in the United States, and has made the Dutton family that owns it very wealthy.
The first of two shows vying for space in Yellowstone is about the Dutton family, and they’re essentially occupying the same “dark primetime drama meets family drama” crossover space as Succession. (Before you assume one is copying the other, note that Yellowstone and Succession premiered just 17 days apart in 2018.)
The show focuses on the head of the Dutton family, John (Costner), who’s… well, he’s Logan Roy. He’s rough and sometimes mean. His children crave his approval, but it’s not always forthcoming. He’ll do whatever it takes to keep his land, even as a variety of opponents, from nearby Native tribes to big-city land developers to random lowlifes, try to steal it from him.
The Succession parallels continue from there. Yellowstone follows the internal squabbling of John Dutton’s three youngest children, two sons and a daughter. Those two sons are the well-behaved Jamie (Wes Bentley), who tries to impress and disappoint his father (aka Kendall), and Kayce (Luke Grimes), who’s estranged from the family at the start of the show but slowly comes around (Roman). The daughter is Beth (Kelly Reilly), who is perhaps Yellowstone’s breakout character because of her willingness to spit venom and stick her fingers in the lamplight of her own dark past (yes, that’s Shiv). The three have an older brother named Lee (Dave Annable), but he’s not exactly Yellowstone’s Connor because—slight spoiler alert—he dies in the very first episode.
Some Yellowstone fans have pointed out how similar the entire premise of the show is to The Godfather off Succession, and perhaps this particular sibling arrangement is just something that appeals to American audiences. Regardless, the overlap with The Godfather makes sense because the one constant of Yellowstone—and one that hasn’t kept up with Succession—is murder. The characters solve problems by killing with shocking regularity, to the point where the first season had a seemingly random death or two in every episode. (My favorite death on Yellowstone, however, isn’t actually a murder; it happens when two tourists die after being chased off a cliff by a bear.)
Is the ranch linked to that many murders? I grew up in a rural area and would like to say no, but I probably know the wrong person. The violence that appears in almost every Yellowstone episode gives the show a creepy, compelling look, and it fits half of the DNA of primetime soap operas. Certainly the way, for example, the third season ends with literal explosions and gunfire, is exactly what Dynasty or Dallas or Melrose Place would have done. Meanwhile, all that nonsense tends to overshadow any serious consideration of how the Dutton family hurt each other. The plots never feel thematically connected.
Which brings me to the second show on Yellowstone. It’s also a mix of family drama and primetime soap opera, but about a completely different group of characters. In this case, the “family” is a group of people who temporarily live in a barn on the Dutton ranch. They work as hired hands, except they’re not just “hired” in the literal sense: When they’re brought into the group, they’re actually branded with a giant Y, meaning they’re employees of the Dutton ranch for life. (Sound creepy? Yellowstone admits that, yes, being branded hurts, but it also claims that it makes you feel like you’re actually a real person.)
