Tip your Stetson to cowboy Costner: this is Succession via The Archers
Yellowstone,
Paramount , 9pm
★★★✩✩
THERE are plenty of “tip of the hat” moments to Yellowstone, Paramount Network’s paean to macho cowboy culture. The first is, well, the opening moment. The camera pulls out on a wide, blue sky, a frightened horse’s head in close up, and a human hand coming to comfort it. “Where in the Old West am I?” The Viewer wonders, reaching for The Viewer’s best Stetson and getting comfortable.
“It’s not fair, this life,” mumbles a bloodied Kevin Costner, our brooding anti-hero, who — hang on — is wearing a gilet. This is, in fact, not the O.K. Corral, but a multi-car pile-up on a hard shoulder involving a yellow JCB digger. And, ah, Costner is now shooting that horse in the face with a handgun. Mustang, sadly.
John Dutton (Costner) is the patriarch of the largest cattle ranch in Montana. It’s beset by encroaching housing developers (including the nefarious JCB owner, who has installed a neighbouring golf course by Dutton’s land just to throw taunts at him over the barbed fence), oil surveyors, and a wealthy Cherokee tribe flush with casino money and determined to buy their land back.
Dutton has four grown kids, whose use on the range is demarcated by how much facial hair they have: the bushiest, Lee, is an able farmhand who helps deliver a young cow; the most cleanshaven, unfeasibly handsome lawyer Jamie, is tasked with fighting legal incursions via the courts. Dutton’s estranged son Kayce, who lives on the Native American reservation, just wants to be free. It’s Succession, by way of Ambridge Farm. This is telly that snarls knowingly at outsiders with their fancy words like paean, to the extent that if you were born within the M25 you’ll feel deliciously unwelcome. You’re “all hat, no cattle”, as a Montanan might say. Or “you look like a real soft f***”, as Dutton’s Salt Lake City businesswoman daughter Beth puts it to one letch who tries to hit on her. “All you city boys do.”
Women are used gratuitously in Yellowstone’s rugged manscape. Later, she casually knocks boots with her father’s right hand man like he’s a plaything. There’s a lot of sex, some murder, and too much wrangling over the small print of development contracts.
Cultural incidences of cowboys, like zombies, are a fairly accurate barometer of how wary society is feeling about its own sunset. The Golden Age of Westerns came in the Thirties, amid the Great Depression. Now cowboys are back, in the pop charts (Lil Nas X), on television (HBO’s Westworld) and in the video game market (Red Dead Redemption was even referenced in the Gavin & Stacy Christmas special). “It’s called progress,” our developer friend says, “and progress doesn’t need your permission.” It’s one of the show’s many clanging euphemisms for “people are rubbish”. This is an intriguing family affair. But frankly, I envy the horse.