I liked Yellowstone Better When It Was Called Legends of the Fall.

6 min readSep 22, 2023

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 bad guys — the salt-of-the-earth country folk versus the soulless city-dwellers who don’t know what it means to truly live, the meat-fueled ranchers who feed America versus the bed-wetting vegan environmentalists who fundamentally misunderstand ecology and human biology.

John Dutton III is more ruthless than Walt Longmire, another widowed TV cowboy whose age betrays him in some of the more physical scenes, but he’s principled in his own way. A man’s man whose loved ones’ lives revolve around him and his approval, he rules his vast empire from his helicopter. He is the eye of the storm. Because conflicted men are the axis around which the rest of us naturally spin.

The Godfather was made in the early 70s about the 40s and 50s. Legends of the Fall was made in the 90s about the 1910s and 20s. They have many of the same representational shortcomings of Yellowstone, both as a product of the time they were made and the eras they depict.

From the pilot alone, Yellowstone’s fanfare is not surprising. But how was any modern show still perpetuating three of the media’s most enduring representational failures in 2018?

Because centering an old white man and his struggle to keep his wealth and power in a changing world was not an oversight. It wasn’t a metaphor. It is a mirror-as-dire-warning, a siren of a swan song sounding for the endangered white male, the last of the “real” men.

Indigenous Communities Deserve Better Representation

Director Taylor Sheridan is not Indigenous, nor are any of Yellowstone’s writers. In Season 1, there are only three principal Indigenous characters. Only two of them are portrayed by Indigenous actors.

The story should revolve around them, not the Dutton family.

“The film bears a slight but inescapable whiff of cultural tourism,” Ann Hornaday said of Sheridan’s Wind River.³

Whether the Dutton family’s true motivation is greed or entitlement (or both) the Ludlow family of Legends of the Fall only ranched what they needed to survive and feed themselves. They were a humbler Montana ranching family, and the patriarch’s legacy, though failed, was an attempt to return land to Indigenous communities. He did not want his children to go to war. He expressly forbade it.

If you haven’t watched Reservation Dogs yet, prioritize that over Yellowstone.

“Reservation Dogs is the first and only TV series where every writer, director, and series regular is Indigenous.”⁴ Not only is it funny and full of heart, it is well written, it is original, and it centers deliberately historically marginalized stories.

2. Women Deserve Better Representation

Female nudity is not excessive in Yellowstone. But it’s still there to decorate a man’s world.

The women in Yellowstone are slightly more complex than the damsels-in-distress of yore. This is a modern Western, after all. But they are still defined almost wholly by their devotion to their men — their fathers, husbands, lovers, or sons. Their character arcs are rooted in their relationships to these men.

Yes, corporate financier Beth Dutton is as ruthless as her father, arguably sociopathic. Unlike Constanza Corleone, Susannah Fincannon, and Lindsay Bluth, the silk-blouse-and-pencil-skirt has a cutthroat career. She is more professional and driven than Lindsey Bluth. But she is just as tormented from beyond the grave by her mother’s inexplicable cruelty as Bluth is by her living mother. These female characters are just different degrees of one-dimensional.

The daughters (and daughter-in-law on Legends of the Fall) are largely ornamental. That is to say, the classic American three-sons-and-a-patriarch formula is only making incremental progress in how women and minorities are portrayed while still centering white men as the principal narrative, the indispensable backbones of their families — and civilizations writ large. Female and minority characters advance the plots of the white male protagonists who enjoy comparatively nuanced personalities, backstories, relationships, and character arcs.

If you haven’t already read about the Bechdel-Wallace test, it is as straightforward as it is revelatory in evaluating media: Are there two or more female characters? Do they talk to each other? Do they talk to each other about anything besides men? It is astonishing how many movies and TV shows fail these three simple precepts.

Of the four productions mentioned above, only Arrested Development occasionally passes the Bechdel-Wallace test. In Yellowstone, only one scene so far depicts two or more women talking to each other. But they are standing in the kitchen, worriedly discussing their children and their men while they make dinner for their husbands, all of whom are lounging in the living room instead of helping.

3. Men deserve better than generational toxic masculinity

Don’t scream if you find yourself on the red-hot end of a cattle brand. “Be a man about it.” Grit your teeth and bear emergency surgery without anesthesia. That’s why God invented whiskey. Don’t cry if you find out your father’s leaving your family to join the Army. Even if you’re only eight years old. Don’t let your son see you cry. And if you have to kill a man, make sure he sees it coming.

Everyone under the control of Yellowstone’s above-the-law third-generation rancher follows Dutton’s unwritten rules for masculinity, none with more self-satisfied cunning than his cartoon villain daughter.

In these three-sons-and-a-patriarch sagas, grown sons have three options to define and distinguish themselves: serve their father, defy their father, or earn his respect by defying him with everything you’ve got.

A modern-day drama could model more complex masculinity than the age-old anger-is-the-only-acceptable-emotion-for-men trope. Perhaps it will as the show progresses. Only one son has so far been brave enough to try and earn his own living. Another is on the verge. If they can be that brave externally, they might also evolve inwardly into more emotionally complex men.

Tropes and all, Yellowstone is compelling location-as-genre escapism. But it glamorizes greed, parasitic wealth, and power while perpetuating a myopic colonialist narrative of American land and Native populations. We all deserve better.

The Rewind

I liked Yellowstone Better When It Was Called Legends of the Fall.

Published in The Rewind

Written by Heather M. Edwards

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