Paramount TV’s “Yellowstone” Is Getting Weird—and Very, Very Political—in Troubling Ways That a Lot of People Seem to Be Missing
What started out as a fairly anodyne Dallas- or Dynasty-style melodrama—a hybrid of the Sopranos, Downton Abbey, and Brokeback Mountain—has turned into something else entirely. And it’s concerning.
{Note: This essay contains spoilers for episode 1 of Season 5 of Paramount TV’s Yellowstone.}
Yellowstone keeps getting weirder and weirder. While it’s clearly being watched by a lot of red-staters as a sort of MAGA fantasy—not just a fantasy of what this country is but a fantasy of what MAGA itself is, i.e. principle-driven rather than, as is actually the case, fundamentally anarcho-nihilistic—what is less clear is whether the show is aware that it’s a deeply dystopian artwork.
The two back-to-back scenes I just saw in Yellowstone, both from the first episode of Season 5, were deeply troubling.
In the first, Kayce Dutton, the Yellowstone character most commonly deemed the show’s most likable—and this is a show with almost no genuinely likable characters—talks trash to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) by calling them “sheep” for believing, as an RCMP captain tells Dutton they do as Canadians, that while “it might be the Wild West on that side [of the U.S.-Canada border], on this side rules are the foundation of order, and order holds the flanks of a civilized society.”
It’s a pretty stilted bit of script—and that’s saying something for a show obsessed with axioms, platitudes, maxims, and clichés—but the RCMP captain is unambiguously correct about how to build a community that lasts. There is no attorney or ethicist who would say otherwise. Yet it is the likable Montana rancher Kayce’s view that justice and rule of law are almost entirely without connection (a pretty bracing prejudice, given that he is the Montana Livestock Commissioner and therefore has some police powers) that’s a throwback to a dark period in American history that almost no one in America wants to go back to.
Cut to the next scene, in which the man who taught Kayce Dutton everything he knows, his father John Dutton, is about to be sworn in as the Governor of Montana. The elder Dutton has narrowly won his gubernatorial race with just 53% of the Montana vote, which is pretty improbable given that he explicitly ran against progress of any kind in the state and there simply aren’t enough ranchers, even in Montana, to make that slogan a winning one. I suppose the thinking is that if you add together all those in Montana who vote red no matter what and those who (like the only intermittently likable John Dutton) are wealthy white male landowners with little sense of anything outside Montana, you come up with around 53% of the state.
And who knows, maybe that’s true.
The point here is that what happens next is extremely strange.