I liked Yellowstone Better When It Was Called Legends of the Fall.
It took someone thirty years to answer Paula Cole’s question but it seems all the cowboys have gone to CBS. The khaki-est of middle America TV networks is now airing Yellowstone — “a desperate and threatened appeal to American identity and white masculinity.”¹
Real men lasso cattle thieves and grizzly bears. Real men read the Bible by firelight with straight whiskey after walking off gunshot wounds. They break wild horses — and each other. And unlike grad students at liberal arts universities, they wear Carhartts because real men earn an honest living with their calloused hands. They don’t ask questions. They damn sure don’t ask permission. And they don’t drink your fancy city coffee neither.
There is no stereotype too clichéd for show creator Taylor Sheridan.
This neo-Western iteration of the classic three-sons-and-a-patriarch formula, (masterfully done by The Godfather, Legends of the Fall, and Arrested Development), begins with a conflict in which both sides are morally right, if not legally. And it has everything you’d expect from any Western: female nudity, antler chandeliers, “tough men making tough decisions,”² their cowboy hats silhouetted against sweeping landscapes while low-growling “reckon” and “ain’t,” and artificially simple dichotomies between the good guys and the…
