Is it just Succession for rednecks, or something more important? On 11th November, the final episodes of the fifth (and supposedly last) season of Yellowstone will premiere on Paramount Plus, steering the blockbuster neo-western saga towards a crisp sunset.
Millions of fans have been waiting since January 2023 for these concluding chapters—which, because of scheduling conflicts, and to widespread dismay, will no longer feature Kevin Costner as John Dutton III, ruthless patriarch of a Montana ranching dynasty.
The cultural significance of Yellowstone is etched into the bewildered and sometimes irritable responses of most liberal critics to its enduring success. Dismissed as though it were Game of Thrones for cowboys, the Borgias on horses, or Cormac McCarthy for illiterates, the series has been the subject of many puzzled articles in the New York Times, which cannot get its collective head around the popularity of the Duttons’ story (in the US alone, 12m people watched the first episode of season five).
As the newspaper’s conservative columnist Ross Douthat put it in July 2022, Yellowstone is “the most red-state show on television”—America being a country where red means Republican.
Taylor Sheridan, the showrunner and writer of the series, has bridled at this characterisation, on the grounds that the show addresses sensitively “the displacement of Native Americans” to the fictional Broken Rock Indian Reservation. But you only have to watch a few episodes of Yellowstone to grasp how disingenuous his objection is. Yes, the Duttons intermittently align themselves with Chief Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) to fend off the common enemy—namely, the coastal elites and property developers that covet their land. But these are temporary alliances of convenience.
As a sixth-generation rancher, Dutton harbours no regrets whatsoever for the blood that his family has shed to seize and maintain an iron grip upon its vast holdings. He judges his children by the extent of their allegiance to this sacred cause: Beth (Kelly Reilly), the devoted, clever and frequently vicious daughter, who marries Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser), the Duttons’ most trusted ranch hand; Kayce (Luke Grimes), an ex-Navy Seal who, with his Native American wife Monica (Kelsey Asbille), is ambivalent about the ranch and all it symbolises; and Jamie (Wes Bentley), Dutton’s adopted son and a Harvard-educated lawyer who is drawn back to the homestead against his better instincts.
Amid all the soap opera of Yellowstone, its values are pitilessly conservative, Darwinian and shot through with pessimism. When Beth declares that “God is the land”, she expresses the show’s core proposition. Land is more important than money, than love, than the law and, once conquered, it is not to be given up without a fight to the death. When Dutton comes across a busload of Chinese tourists marvelling at the beauty of his ranch, he brandishes a loaded rifle. “This is America,” he roars. “We don’t share land here.”
In ‘Yellowstone’, land is more important than money, than love, than the law
Angela Blue Thunder (Q’orianka Kilcher), a consultant hired by Rainwater, goes even further. “There’s no such thing as morality,” she tells the tribal chieftain. “There’s own the land and lose the land.” In similar spirit, Dutton warns Carter (Finn Little), a troubled teenaged boy taken in by the ranch, that “there’s no such thing as fair”. According to Lloyd Pierce, Yellowstone’s oldest cowboy: “You’re either born a willow or you’re born an oak. That’s all there is to it.” There is little mercy or redemption or empathy on offer in this inhospitable landscape.
Explaining the roots of his saga, Sheridan has often paid tribute to Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove (1985), an uncompromisingly brutal tale of the American West in the 1880s. His characters in Yellowstone also quote freely from The Solace of Open Spaces (1985), Gretel Ehrlich’s acclaimed collection of essays on rural life in Wyoming. “To be tough is to be fragile,” says Beth to her father, “to be tender is to be truly fierce.” And—just to ensure there is no doubt about the scale of his ambitions—Sheridan has spelt out his objective to bring the “John Ford experience to television”.
What makes Yellowstone more than just another entertaining epic of the West, transplanting the family-at-war formula of Dallas or Dynasty to Big Sky country, is its precise cultural context. The show is emphatically a product of its time and, more specifically, of the divisions and psychological secessions that scar contemporary US society.
In its often-pathological suspicion of change, the series resonates explicitly with the mood of the modern American right. When John runs for governor of Montana, he spells this out: “If it’s progress you seek, do not vote for me. I am the opposite of progress. I am the wall that it bashes against, and I will not be the one who breaks.”
Though this goes beyond even Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, it meshes with many of the beliefs of the Republican nominee’s most ardent supporters in the flyover states. What Sheridan grasps is that there are many versions of the American Dream, and that the notion of “manifest destiny”—the exceptionalism of the pioneers, their conquest of the West, and their resistance to all who would supplant them—remains deeply embedded in the nation’s DNA.
The Dutton ranch enshrines a notion of order that has little to do with the US constitution and the rule of law. “I am your justice,” Trump said at an event in Maryland in March 2023. “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”
In like manner, Dutton runs the Montana Livestock Association as his own private militia. His most trusted ranch hands are branded with a “Y” to signify a loyalty to something far deeper and more visceral than citizenship. Like Trump seeking the presidency, John regards the governorship of Montana as simply another means of pursuing his private interests.
Indeed, there is no public sphere to speak of in Yellowstone; only a never-ending war for familial control and territorial advantage. Unlike Trump, Dutton doubts that the forces of decline and decadence can be kept at bay for long. “I don’t think we make it a hundred years,” he says. “Then God starts over. Tries again. If he’s got the stomach for it.”
The notion of a righteous America besieged on all sides by enemies, conspiracies and cultural disruptors is the essence of US conservatism in 2024. What Trump intuited when he announced his first candidacy in 2015 was that the old politics of the right—fiscal restraint, global military supremacy, constitutional oversight—was no longer speaking to the electorate.
For nine years, he has encouraged Americans to believe that they are being assailed, shortchanged and undermined by a galaxy of forces: liberals, migrants, Muslims, judges, “fake news”, the Deep State, Haitian pet murderers and what Elon Musk calls the “woke mind virus”. Whether or not Trump beats Kamala Harris in November, this is where the centre of gravity of the US Right now lies.
Yellowstone offers a contemporary mythologisation of that world view. As it happens, Dutton would probably be suspicious of Trump, given his history as a Manhattan property developer. In his acceptance speech as governor, Dutton lets rip at outsiders who treat Montana as a resource to be sold on to the highest bidder: “We are New York’s novelty and California’s toy.” But he is the dramatic personification of an important facet of Maga culture: Herbert Hoover’s “rugged individualism” married to the siege mentality, toxic masculinity and capricious cruelty of Trumpland.
Why attach such significance to a single show? Because Yellowstone is definitely not an outlier. For a start, it has already spawned a suite of spin-offs. In the prequel miniseries, 1883, Tim McGraw plays Dutton’s great-grandfather James, alongside Faith Hill (McGraw’s real-life wife) as Margaret, the matriarch of the nascent dynasty, as they travel to Montana in wagons.
The action is narrated by their daughter Elsa Dutton (Isabel May), who has an Ehrlich-style taste for aphorism: “No matter how much we love it, the land will never love us back”; “If land can have emotions, this land hates us”; and “To survive the frontier you must learn to recognise those who won’t and be wary of their doomed decisions. They are to be avoided at all costs because their fear is tragedy’s closest cousin. And tragedy is contagious in this place.” Phew.
Next came 1923, starring Harrison Ford as Jacob Dutton, James’s brother, with Helen Mirren as his wife Cara, raising their nephew John Senior. In February, it was renewed for a second season.
Separately, a sequel series titled The Madison, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, is now in production, and a third prequel strand, 1944, is planned, alongside 6666, which takes its name from the real-life Texan ranch owned by Sheridan. With six shows set in the same fictional universe, he is vying with the world-builders of The Walking Dead, Marvel and Game of Thrones.
Sheridan postures as JRR Tolkien in a Stetson and lizard-skin boots, endlessly extending the boundaries of his cowboy Middle Earth in time and space. More importantly, he is not alone in his aspiration to construct creative empires that cater predominantly to conservative cultural tastes.
It is an exaggeration to say that Hollywood is, and has always been, left-liberal in its political inclinations or implacably hostile to conservatism. As Gregory D Black writes in Hollywood Censored (1994), the long reign from 1934 to 1968 of the Motion Picture Production Code initially enforced by the Republican politician Will H Hays, amounted to a “system of self-mutilation”, severely restricting the portrayal on-screen of profanity, sexuality, ridicule of the clergy, mixed-race relationships and more or less anything else that might offend conservative tastes.
What’s more, many moguls and stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood—Walt Disney, Cecil B DeMille, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Ginger Rogers and John Wayne—were enthusiastic opponents of the radical Left’s influence in the movie industry, imagined or real. Under the umbrella of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, they did much to legitimise the anti-communist “blacklist”.
‘Hollywood’ has become shorthand for a location on the political and cultural spectrum
Yet it is true that, in recent decades, the movie and television industry has been perceived as almost uniformly liberal, both in the views promulgated by studios and those promoted by its stars. “Hollywood” has become shorthand for a location on the political and cultural spectrum as much as for the historic home of filmmaking.
This is what President Bartlet’s Republican opponent, Governor Ritchie, means when he denounces him in the third season finale of The West Wing: “You're Hollywood, you’re weak, you’re liberal, and you can’t be trusted. And if it appears from time to time as if I don’t like you, well, those are just a few of the many reasons why.”
The tract that did most to codify this perception is Michael Medved’s Hollywood vs. America (1992), in which the conservative movie critic railed against the alleged spiritual vacuity of the film industry, the violence and promiscuity in blockbuster movies, and their supposed contempt for religion and the traditional family. For Medved, who is now 75, this constituted an existential crisis: “As I watch my own sleeping children, hugging each other in the bed they share with the blankets tangled around their feet, I experience a terrible sense of powerlessness.”
In 2024, there is a growing cohort of conservative creative entrepreneurs who, like Sheridan, will not settle for cultural impotence. And, as the old studio system has morphed and fragmented, challenged by streaming services and standalone digital companies, a space has been created for new entrants to the market.
Notable among them is Angel Studios, a Christian production company founded three years ago, that is committed to “Godly movies”. Most of its content appeals to a niche audience—but this pattern was broken spectacularly last year by the box-office triumph of Sound of Freedom. Outperforming the latest instalments of the Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible and Fast & Furious franchises, this thriller, loosely based on the campaign against child sex-trafficking led by former Homeland Security official Tim Ballard (Jim Caviezel), became a word-of-mouth sensation. Trump hosted a private screening at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey.
Success bred controversy as Caviezel (who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ) appeared to suggest that Sound of Freedom was aligned with the notorious QAnon conspiracy theory. The followers of this ludicrous digital cult claim that paedophile politicians and celebrities harvest the blood of trafficked children. The actor has said that he too believes in the existence of this so-called “adrenochroming” process and has attended QAnon-related events. “This is one of the best films I’ve ever done,” he insists. “The film is on Academy Award level.” The latter claim is certainly untrue.
Though Sound of Freedom generated more heat than light, it demonstrated the potential of Angel’s business model, which depends heavily upon crowdfunding and “pay-it-forward” messaging. As the credits roll, Caviezel tells audience members that they can donate tickets to those who otherwise could not afford to see the movie by scanning a QR code shown on screen. This donation system raised $26m, subsidising 1.82m free tickets.
A different business model applies in the case of the Daily Wire, the conservative news site and media company founded in 2015 by the right-wing polemicist Ben Shapiro and film producer Jeremy Boreing. Primarily, it is a podcast company, showcasing regular presenters such as Shapiro, Matt Walsh and Jordan Peterson, and reported $220m in revenue last year from one million subscribers. Its success has enabled it to branch out into self-funded moviemaking, initially with two feature-length documentaries fronted by Walsh: What Is a Woman?, which addresses trans identity, and Am I Racist?, which was released in US theatres in September. In December 2023, a truly dreadful comedy, Lady Ballers, in which a group of men pretend to be trans to compete in a women’s basketball league, was released on DailyWire Plus. Other movies are in production.
In response to the supposed “wokery” of Disney animation, The Daily Wire has also launched Bentkey, a conservative entertainment app for children. For Maga adults who cannot stomach South Park or Family Guy, meanwhile, there is the animated series Mr Birchum, featuring Adam Carolla as a wood shop teacher who is constantly outraged by the political correctness he encounters everywhere.
Many of these ventures will flop because of their poor quality or failure to gain traction in an already overcrowded market. But some will succeed. Yellowstone and its spin-offs have shown that there is a real demand for unabashedly red-state entertainment that does not agonise about social justice, diversity of representation or the historic crimes of America.
Undoubtedly, this new cultural wave—still in its early stages—is intimately related to and has been oxygenated by Trump’s prominence. But it is emphatically not dependent upon it. Conservative content creation now has a confidence that would have been unthinkable only a decade ago. For those who dislike mainstream Hollywood entertainment, there are investors, writers and platforms willing to supply an alternative. Even The Babylon Bee, the Christian satirical site, has a feature length movie coming soon, entitled January 6: The Most Deadliest Day.
There is a pipeline of consumers for future red-state entertainment
Much more important than Trump himself are the profound social divisions in the US that have kept him in the political mainstream for nine years and will long outlast his political career.
As Bill Bishop writes in The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (2008): “Everybody thinks the political process is screwed up, but no one thinks they’re part of the reason for the screw-up.”
The balkanisation of contemporary America is not confined to liberals watching MSNBC and conservatives choosing Fox News. More than ever, US families are “reordering their lives around their values, their tastes, and their beliefs”. What political journalists fretfully call polarisation is, in Bishop’s analysis, a quiet, mostly voluntary process by which Americans have carved up national life into digital and geographical clusters.
One such cluster is gen Z men who, according to some polls, favour Trump’s Maga over Harris’s page-turning progressivism by a double-digit margin. There is, in other words, a pipeline of consumers for future red-state entertainment.
In this sociopolitical context, the only question is why it has taken conservatives so long to construct their own media silo. And the probable answer is that patience is required for any disaggregated group of companies and individuals to achieve the necessary critical mass; to muster the determination, accumulate the resources and identify the distribution channels required to achieve cultural lift-off. Sheridan has Paramount Plus; others will make do with much smaller platforms. It is the combined impact that counts.
Yellowstone returns to UK screens only six days after the US presidential election. By then, Trump may already have been defeated. But red-state entertainment is here to stay, at home and on the big screen. The battle for the White House will soon be settled. But the battle for the movie house is only just beginning.
