Yellowstone: The hit TV show that exposes cultural divides
Yellowstone, a violent drama about family legacy and the tides of change in the Montana mountains, is the most-watched show on cable television in the United States, though depending on where you live, you might not know it.
The Paramount Network drama starring Kevin Costner as the tough, scheming owner of the largest ranch in the United States drew more than 11 million viewers for its fourth-season finale earlier this month without streaming, a viewership not seen since the heyday of 2010s mainstays like Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, both of which were hugely popular and critically acclaimed. (The sixth season of HBO’s fantasy epic, for example, only saw 10.61 million viewers in its first week, including streaming; AMC’s zombie apocalypse drama peaked in its fifth season from 2014-15, with an average viewership of 14.4 million per episode.)
Benedict Cumberbatch in The Power of the Dog Golden Globes: The Power of the Dog and Succession win at the celebrity-free ceremony Read more However, despite being on par with Thrones and The Walking Dead without an explicit streaming channel (full seasons have been licensed to NBC’s Peacock, while new episodes are available on CBS’s nascent streaming network Paramount+), Yellowstone hasn’t garnered the same critical attention or media scrutiny as its ratings predecessors. Co-creator Taylor Sheridan (who also serves as head writer and occasional director) has earned rave reviews for his gritty neo-Westerns like Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River, but Yellowstone, which premiered in 2018, has been overlooked by awards shows. (It picked up its first major nomination, the 2022 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series, on Wednesday.) Culture sites like Vulture and Ringer have posted episode summaries, but there have been no Essays, media Twitter chatter, or substantive analysis of HBO’s Succession, a raucous, painful portrait of a media conglomerate that parallels Yellowstone’s themes—massive wealth, squabbling siblings, a family defending its fortune—and stands in stark contrast to its lack of critical attention.
Streaming is supposed to be the great equalizer, whether for content accessibility (see: global hits like Netflix’s Squid Game, the dystopian Korean drama that reached 111 million households worldwide by the end of 2021) or segmentation into competing platforms vying for their niches and IP pieces. Yellowstone offers a compelling rebuke to these trends: a word-of-mouth hit in the heartland, for lack of a better term for the loose but distinct geographic segmentation in the United States, and a phenomenon of cultural blocs between urban-oriented consumers of premium cable and basic cable consumers in the suburbs (smaller cities surrounded by farmland, suburbs, small towns, rural communities). Paramount is building a popular universe around the success of Yellowstone — the 1883 prequel, starring country superstars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill as well as Sam Elliott, scored the biggest debut for a cable show since 2015 in December — and a large chunk of the country hasn’t noticed. It’s hard not to compare Yellowstone and Succession, both on a superficial level and as an indicator of the cultural bubble. Though they have contrasting tones — Succession is lyrically edgy, cynical, and profane, Yellowstone is serene, dramatic, and philosophically reflective — both depict generations of the super-rich scrambling to protect their fortunes (a media conglomerate akin to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp; a ranch the size of Rhode Island) from threats outside the family (other corporations; real estate developers; Native American tribes seeking reparations).
Both deal in arcane business disputes (hostile takeovers and shareholder meetings, land and water rights). Both patriarchs enjoy traveling by helicopter, while their children (three sons and a daughter, the most difficult of them all) compete for attention and approval. Both employ lush visual motifs to convey lofty ambitions—in Succession, the airy, unsentimental extravagance suggests the utter soullessness of wealth; in Yellowstone, the panoramic mountain vistas and descriptions
