We watched the first season of Yellowstone (eight episodes, or about 350 full minutes, all told). It's not our usual fare, but because a close relative, an accomplished actor, has just contracted to appear in Season Four, it seemed important to investigate. Yellowstone sustained our interest but in my opinion it's mighty derivative. I think the title should be changed to The Sopranos Go West. The principal character, played by Kevin Costner, isn't precisely a Mafia don, but he's modeled on one. He owns a Rhode-Island-size slice of Montana and he protects his property with gangster tactics. Like Tony Soprano, he fights with his family, feuds with his consigliere, corrupts public officials, strong-arms his enemies, and doesn't hesitate to bribe or ice his opponents. Yellowstone creates a nasty dog-eat-dog Hobbesian universe that offers only an occasional redeeming event and, among a huge cast, only two or three sympathetic characters.
Yellowstone is not at all pastoral. The spectacular western landscape is brimful with events common to gruesome noir and urban crime films. In the episodes we watched, two tourists fell from a cliff and splattered, a woman was impaled by a steel fence post, a teacher who tried to intervene in a playground scuffle was accidentally struck to the ground and developed a brain hemorrhage, a cowboy trying to leave his job was shot in the head and his body dumped in a ravine, a new Yellowstone employee was branded on the chest with a red-hot iron, a woman was crushed to death by a horse, two brothers-in-law were shot and killed in a gunfight, a 10-year-old boy was stranded in a culvert with a rattlesnake twice his size, a real estate developer was kidnapped and hanged, and a meth house blew up and burned its occupant to death. I didn't keep a running tally of the various atrocities so there were probably a few that I've forgotten.
We're hoping that our relative has a continuing part in the series (he's supposed to play a doctor), but we're fearful that he'll be on screen for a minute and a half before he gets his throat slit or loses a limb or two to an enormous John Deere harvester. We won't know for a year.
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