Yellowstone is one of the most popular TV series. What is Yellowstone?
Yellowstone is a Succession movie set on a ranch, with murder, Kevin Costner, and the blind spots of communist America.
An overbearing father flaunts his wealth for all to see. His four children criticize and badmouth each other. They include an eldest son who doesn’t contribute much, a second son who is a tortured heir, a business-savvy daughter who is her father’s favorite (though he never says so), and a youngest son who is a bit of a jerk but is clearly going to take over the family business when it’s all said and done.
The daughter’s romance with a tall, lanky goofball who has nothing to do with the main family makes for an unlikely comedic pairing. The family is surrounded on all sides by people who want to tear apart the family empire and swallow it whole. Oh, and they spend a lot of time fighting the government.
Does that sound like an accurate description of Succession? Because technically, it is an accurate description of Succession. But it’s also an accurate description of another cable series that’s significantly more popular in terms of viewership: Paramount Network’s Yellowstone, starring Kevin Costner. While Succession takes place in the New York media world, Yellowstone takes place on a big ranch in the middle of Montana. Does that make Yellowstone a red-state version of Succession? That’s a really simplistic statement, so I would never say it, but if you want to, I won’t stop you.
Succession drew a respectable 564,000 viewers for its season three premiere in October. But Yellowstone drew 4.23 million viewers for its own season three premiere in June 2020. (It returns for season four on November 7.) And while the bulk of Succession’s audience comes from streaming—which isn’t as measurable as live TV viewership and may make Succession more popular than its live ratings suggest—Yellowstone, which also draws some viewers from streaming, is almost certainly more popular.
Often, when I mention all of the above to someone who’s millennial or younger, their response is, “I’ve never even heard of this show. Paramount Network? What?” or “Oh, my mom loves that show.” Compared to Succession, a prestigious HBO series and a critically acclaimed show whose second and third seasons have become the subject of endless online discussion, Yellowstone has barely gotten a second look from people talking about television on the internet.
But if you search online long enough, you’ll find a thriving Yellowstone fan community. There are T-shirts on Etsy! Fan speculation videos on YouTube with hundreds of thousands of views! A small but mighty collection of fanfics about the show’s main couple, will they/won’t they! That means the secret hit must have tapped into something in the culture, right? Secret hits often do. Maybe Yellowstone can tell us something about how we live today.
But Yellowstone, a worthwhile show that almost consistently gets three out of five stars, isn’t particularly interested in saying anything grand or sweeping about the world. Instead, like so many TV hits before it, Yellowstone is comforting and upbeat, and doesn’t rock the boat too much. That, in the end, might explain both its appeal and what it, inadvertently, ultimately says about America in 2021.
