While we were paying attention to other things, the world’s most notorious showrunner made his most notorious shows even wilder. “It’s hard to find actors who can ride a horse. So I just said, I’ll do it” is how Taylor Sheridan explains why he’s in the new season of Yellowstone. What? Our critic Kathryn VanArendonk explains.
I’m coming in sideways to ask you about Taylor Sheridan’s TV properties. Are you watching Lioness? Are people watching Lioness? This show is insane and I love it but it's horrifically manipulative; it's like TV on steroids. It also has Taylor Sheridan himself often showing up to save the day as a grizzled (hot) old soldier. And needless to say the politics are absolutely crackers.
I am watching Lioness, although I’m a bit behind — I’ve generally been avoiding the rest of the Sheridanverse after being totally exhausted by 1923. But now, unfortunately, I am in. (So are lots of people. Lioness ratings are quite good.) I’m nearly up to the end of season two, which is great because I’ve gotten both the transphobic speech from the beloved dad character AND the transphobic speech from the evil cartel lord.
That's fun! I just can't get over what people look like on this show and on 1923 for that matter. (Sorry, I also loved 1923 and can't wait for its return! I have issues!) I've never seen such wonderful visual caricatures of hotness. The women are so emaciated or plush; the men have such robust hair and delts. The script is similar!
The men do have robust hair, which is really so impressive given how often they’re nearly drowned in a river or eaten alive by lions or dragged underneath a wagon or attacked by wolves or shot at by villains. My assumption is that the hair provides some kind of protective qualities? As for the women, one of our Vulture commenters pointed out that they tend to have noticeable facial scars, and if not permanent scars, they probably have some recent injury that disfigures their hotness (except for their boobs, which are always fine). Taylor Sheridan prefers female hotness to be proved through suffering, and their hair does not seem to help them out as much, sadly.
Oh! I hadn’t registered that all the way, but you're right — they're always marked up in some way. Kind of yikes. So turning to Yellowstone: I had to stop watching this show several decades ago because it was too ... angry? Abrasive? Beth just kept storming in and calling her wuss of a brother names, and I could never figure out why everyone was so mad. Over the seasons, our patriarch, Kevin Costner, has ... departed?
He certainly has departed, a fact the show has found need to mention or retell or relitigate many times over the last five episodes. Thanks to a much-publicized falling out between Sheridan and Costner, Costner’s character John Dutton gets killed off at the beginning of season five, part two, and he doesn’t even get a big monologue or an exciting fight where he dies protecting the ones he loves or even a last long look over the horizon. He gets dragged from his bed in the middle of the night, drugged, and then his death is staged to look like suicide. It’s an angry show! And increasingly, the anger seems to be not just between fictional characters but between Taylor Sheridan and whatever else is happening behind the scenes, which then leeches into the series and becomes the only thing anyone on Yellowstone can talk about!
So the story of Yellowstone is, essentially, a “save the family ranch” plot. After lo these many long seasons, our patriarch has died in this fashion, and yet the future of the ranch is still in jeopardy. But hark! A man has arrived in town to save the ranch. And it's the show's creator and writer, Taylor Sheridan! I think I didn't even realize just how nuts this is until we started talking!
I started watching this recent run of Yellowstone because I knew about the Costner drama, and I knew this might be the end of the series (this is still unclear, although it seems very likely), and I wanted to see how Sheridan was going to wrap up this thing that’s become such an unavoidable cultural behemoth. I had a feeling it would not be a deft, surprising end. Even still, when Taylor Sheridan shows up as his character Travis with a new girlfriend character (played by Bella Hadid!) sitting fondly behind him while he schools a naked woman named Mackenzie on how to play strip poker, I did wonder if we have all somehow stumbled into an alternate universe set inside Sheridan’s imagination? Or whether anyone at Paramount had even seen this episode before it went up? The not one but two strip-poker scenes that Travis of course wins, the pool party, the long sequence where he does tricks on a horse while Bella Hadid looks on with lust in her eyes … I’m not joking, it is one of the worst episodes of television I have ever seen. In my life. And that was even before the scene where Rip tells Beth the story of how he and Travis first met, and the story includes line-for-line retellings of all of Travis’s hilarious wisecracks.
Two things peeve me about this. First of all, Bella Hadid just won rookie of the year from the National Cutting Horse Association and is generally considered a top-notch horsewoman, so for her to be doing the mooning instead of the riding pisses me off. Second of all, this is potentially the penultimate episode of the entire series. The alleged final episode airs on Sunday and literally the logline is "As the Duttons and the Yellowstone cowboys lay John to rest, the fate of the ranch is revealed." How and why did they fill an episode with strip poker and Taylor Sheridan's admirably rippling physique!
The why seems nearly as naked as Taylor Sheridan’s chest throughout this episode, I’m afraid. Because what other explanation or motive could there possibly be? He’s pissed at Costner, he doesn’t know what to do with the end of this show except to circle around the fact of John Dutton’s death over and over again, and he cannot live with the idea of anyone watching the end of this series and not knowing that he, Taylor Sheridan, is the winner of Yellowstone, while John Dutton is not. As an added bonus, he gets to feature both of the ranches he owns, the 6666 and the Bosque Ranch, which is now canonically Travis’s ranch, and do a little product placement for 6666's vodka, which is called Grit and Glory.
We had spon?????
Oh, there is spon. There is so much spon, once you start looking for it. Yellowstone has been one-third car commercial for at least the last two seasons, and although it becomes increasingly hilarious to watch all the footage of Beth driving past a mountain range in a Bentley with a prominently visible brand on the front, at least that’s the sort of spon we can all recognize as basic TV economics these days. It’s the Sheridan-specific spon that’s so truly, boldly American. Because it’s not like we just see Beth drink out of a bottle of it. There’s a whole interaction where she orders a Titos, the bartender says, “this is all we’ve got,” then Beth takes a nice big swig of her 6666 vodka and soda and says “now that’s a drink.”
Remarkable. Two things, hot off the presses: One: "The episode, which featured an appearance from Bella Hadid, scored the biggest audience ‘Yellowstone’ has seen all season, with its viewership seeing a 6% increase compared to its current average viewership of 11.4 million." Two: "The upcoming Season 5 finale of Yellowstone will not be the end of the Dutton clan’s story. Series standouts Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser have closed deals to lead a spinoff series, reprising their roles as Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler." How does this make you feeeeeeel?
I am a mosaic of feelings. A part of me feels despair, of course. The industry has contracted so much in the last year, and it’s depressing to think about how much smaller everything else has gotten while the Sheridan share of TV has only grown. Plus Trump reelected, this is who we are, etc., etc., you get it. As a critic, though, and as a person who unfortunately loves to take a terrible broken thing and cradle it lovingly in my arms and point out all the ways that it sucks, I also feel the familiar hooks of “This will be fun to write about.”
