everything you need to know about 'yellowstone' but were too afraid to ask
trust no other 'yellowstone' primer, especially any other 'yellowstone' primer written primarily with lowercase letters.
what’s up everybody,
last week, the new yorker ran a piece about the television show yellowstone. i’m not gonna link to it because if i do then you might click it and never come back here.
now that the Magazine of Record has tacitly given everybody permission to watch yellowstone, i figured i’d get the jump on everybody else by writing about it. because i have, in fact, been watching yellowstone for some time now, so i am going to “strike while the iron is hot.”
here are the main things you need to know about this show:
1. kevin costner is the main guy. his character is “kevin costner in a cowboy hat and jeans.”
2. the show is extremely self-serious and extremely not self-aware. this is probably helpful, because most people aren’t that into irony.
3. it takes place on the yellowstone ranch in montana, where kevin costner is king. his name is john dutton and i’m never going to refer to him that way again.
4. people say it’s “carhartt succession” or whatever but it’s way more accurate to say that every season essentially replicates the plot of the godfather. the main difference is that even though he’s vito corleone kevin costner doesn’t die. this probably has to do with the fact that kevin costner is the main guy and he’s super famous.
5. kevin corleone obviously has a bunch of kids and they all do different things for his family farm, because that’s the way “the godfather of x” tropes work. the guy who made the show sort of mixed and matched their archetypes though. (please note that while i will continue to refer to kevin costner’s character as “kevin costner,” i’m going to use character names elsewhere, because the actors’ acclaim probably does not rise above “the person from that one thing.”) i will now attempt to tell you which yellowstone children are which godfather characters.
5a. the easiest character to map out on the “yellowstone/godfather continuum” is kayce, kevin costner’s youngest son who at the beginning of the show has rejected the family business of cows + crimes to live an honest life in a trailer on the nearby broken rock reservation with his native wife, monica. (btw, the specific tribal community that broken rock belongs to, as far as i know, is never specified in the show; however, the broken rock scenes are filmed on a crow reservation.) he’s always being like “ehhh maybe i shouldn’t be a rich cowboy who does crimes” and then gets pulled in by the magic tractor beam that kevin costner keeps on his belt buckle. went to war before the beginning of the show’s events, also clearly the most competent at doing all the stuff that you need to do if you take over yellowstone from kevin costner. he’s just so obviously michael corleone that i probably didn’t even need to type this whole thing.
5b. then there’s this dude named rip who kevin costner took in as a teen who as an adult is super murderous and hotheaded and like the loyal “enforcer” guy. but he’s also really soulful!!! he combines tom hagen’s backstory with sonny corleone’s temperament plus luca brasi’s loyalty/enforcement abilities.
5c. he has a son named lee who dies in the first episode. we never really find out what his deal is but it doesn’t matter because his main character trait is that he is killed by kevin costner’s enemies. that dude’s obvo another sonny.
5d. another kevco son is jamie, who is a lawyer who exists to specifically serve his father’s interests (tom hagen) but he’s also feckless and often incompetent and everybody kinda hates him. ergo, he is also fredo corleone.
5e. vito corleone had a daughter so kevin costner also has a daughter. the godfather movies didn’t really give her a bunch of stuff to do (or at least i don’t think so? i haven’t seen a godfather movie in a bajillion years), but oh my god they give kevin costner’s daughter so fucking much to do. we’re watching season three right now and so far beth dutton has:
drunk a bottle of whiskey or whatever at the crack of dawn while bathing nude in a horse trough
had sex with kevin costner’s greatest enemy as a way of psychologically torturing said enemy
started a barfight for fun
gotten in multiple physical altercations with her brother jamie
strongly encouraged her brother jamie to kill himself
humiliated a random small business owner by breaking 90 percent of all glass items in her store as revenge for the store owner being racist against monica
been brutally assaulted by assassins
gotten sober
fallen off the wagon
fallen in love
smoked indoors
6. there is a scene in which a wolf watches two characters have sex and one of them is really into it.
7. get the fuck off kevin costner’s property.
8. there is a cowboy on the show named “cowboy.”
9. kevin costner has a crew of cowboys (which, for a time, includes the cowboy named “cowboy”) that occasionally do cowboy stuff but mostly get in fights and serve as comic relief. in one scene one of the costner cowboys gets beat up in a bar so the whole cowboy crew releases a live bull in the bar then mercilessly beat people up as they run out the back door. this is played for comic effect and the one cos cowboy who refuses to partake in the up-beating is deemed unworthy of the kevin costner brand (the cowboys who actively help do crimes are physically branded with the ranch logo).
10. the politics of the show are slightly different than people assume. at their core they’re sort of anarchist-liberarian, vaguely “woke” in practice (“cowboy” is a gender neutral term in the eyes of the ranch hands, for example) but in that way that’s disdainful of “wokeness” as a term or concept. like the show renders really compassionate, nuanced portraits of native characters and their daily struggles on the reservation. but this is just on an individual level: reservation and its inhabitants are being weaponized by its harvard-educated (liberal) chief who’s trying to use lethal woke business techniques to steal kevin costner’s land. they play ominous, morally ambiguous music when chief rainwater is compromising his morals to get ahead, but then when kevin costner abuses his power as state livestock commissioner (a job he has because it is convenient for the plot) to do a raid on the reservation, they play the “this shit is bad ass” music. but also kevin costner is a great trump allegory, especially because his children are very disappointing.
10a. the most ridiculous thing that happens on the show is when kayce’s wife, a high school teacher, randomly gets hired as a professor at a local university. she immediately makes $70k a year and gets free housing and healthcare even though she’s pretty clearly an adjunct. anyways on her first day of class she walks up to the lectern and is like “oh y’all thought this was history class? psych this is actually woke studies 101.” during one of her lectures the dean of the school (white, old, bow-tie) walks in and sees her berate some random kid about his privilege; the bow-tie dean nods approvingly and all “hell yeah i fucken love woke studies 101.” there’s a case to be made that this is a way of showing another side of monica’s development as a character, but it’s so hackneyed and goofy that it mainly just comes off as a “warning” to parents that “this is what happens to your kids at publicly funded so-called universities aka youth reeducation camps.”
11. it’s stuff like this, plus kevin costner having a gravelly voice and constantly being under siege from outsiders and desperately clinging to his traditional way of life, plus cowboys, that has made the show super-duper popular with “real america,” which is probably a thing you already knew. like wrangler has an entire line of yellowstone shit, and the guy who plays kayce is now making country music. also here’s a rap song by a country singer that’s called “dutton ranch freestyle” where the second half of the video is just him doing yellowstone cosplay:
12. another thing articles about yellowstone like to mention is that it’s apparently the second-most popular thing on tv besides nfl. there’s probably a whole lot of hedging you have to do in order to make that statement technically accurate, but it just feels correct.
13. there exists a part of america so unpopulated that, due to constitutional technicalities, one could hypothetically commit murder there and not be tried for it. like obviously if that ever actually happened a judge would be like “haha nice try buddy” if a guy’s lawyer ever used that excuse, but the important thing is that this real-life place is called the Zone of Death and it’s where the yellowstone characters frequently dump the bodies of the people they kill.
14. the show, along with its two (soon to be three) spinoffs, is exclusively written and directed by one guy. he’s also making at least three other non-yellowstone shows right now too; all of them are for paramount plus which is why you might be only vaguely aware of all of this. he owns a big ranch where they’re gonna film the next yellowstone spinoff. he honestly might be the most important person in hollywood right now just in terms of how much money is riding on him.
15. so far, kevin costner has had sex with the governor of montana at least once a season. eventually he will become the governor of montana but that happens in season five. no idea who he’s gonna have sex with once he’s governor.
16. a very important theme of the show is that rural montana has a narcotic effect that justifies gruesomely murdering your enemies in order to maintain constant access to it.
17. kevin costner (the real guy) endorsed pete buttigieg in the 2020 democratic primary.
18. honestly the music on yellowstone is really good. it’s all colter wall style mournful country music plus fun country-rock and classic country deep cuts and stuff. super good vibes, i’m sure there’s a playlist out there somewhere.
19. kevin costner’s property. you’re still on it. get the fuck off it.
okay, you’re caught up on yellowstone. go west and prosper, young ranch hand.