The Daily Telegraph - Features
Yellowstone, Inc: how Kevin Costner’s cowboy drama created an empire
How America’s most-watched show generated a multimillion-dollar business.
Kevin Costner is not famous for his humility. When he quit the neo-western TV drama
Yellowstone in 2023 over creative issues and “arduous” salary negotiations to focus on his own two-part cowboy movie Horizon: An American Saga, industry tip sheet Puck revealed he’d negotiated an unusual clause in his contract that forbade producers from killing him off in a way that would “cause shame or embarrassment to the character”.
Showing no shame or embarrassment himself, Costner seems to have reversed his position and is reportedly lobbying to appear in the final fifth season. Filming starts on part two of season five this spring and the scripts don’t currently involve his character John Dutton. You’d think it would be a no-brainer. Costner is a big-name star,
Yellowstone is on the small US cable station Paramount and its tiny streaming service Paramount +.
But Yellowstone is no ordinary show. In the multi-fragmented streaming era it is a monumental hit, growing from its 2018 launch to become the most-watched TV show in America. Season four pulled in over 12 million viewers and season five’s premiere attracted 16 million. Amazon and Netflix have already commissioned copycat neoWesterns and studio bosses are so keen to keep the saga going – with or without Costner – that his British co-star Kelly Reilly is on the verge of signing a new contract for a forthcoming spin-off worth $1.2 million (£955,000) per episode, making her one of the best paid actors in the US.
All of this has conspired to make
Yellowstone’s creator,
Taylor Sheridan, one of the most powerful showrunners in Hollywood. The bad news for Costner is, he hasn’t made up his mind if he wants him back.
It’s a spectacular switch in status. Twelve years ago, Costner was filming Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit at Pinewood Studios while Sheridan, 54, was a struggling actor down to his last $800 after quitting crime drama Sons of Anarchy. Having realised he would never be a star, he started trying to sell his first screenplay.
He wrote movies – 2015’s Sicario, 2016’s Hell or High Water and 2017’s Wind River – but he’d been working on Yellowstone, described as “The Godfather on the largest ranch in Montana” since 2013. The series follows Costner’s gruff sixth-generation rancher John Dutton, owner of the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch. He is regularly besieged by forces threatening to break up his ranch – neighbouring Native Americans, resort developers, animal rights activists – and regularly resorts to murder to keep his land.
Sheridan pitched the script around film and TV studios without much interest. Westerns weren’t getting made. Yellowstone was turned down by HBO, which leant into Succession instead. It was finally picked up by Paramount – at that point a cable channel only, and a poor-performing one at that. For the critics and Hollywood, the resulting success was a shock. “HBO shows get all the press, but they don’t get that big an audience,” says Alan Wolk, co-founder of New York media analyst firm TVREV. “Yellowstone just didn’t get critical attention when it launched, then they looked up and thought ‘holy heck!’ It’s a very mainstream hit. The New York Times ran an article calling it a red state show, which got them pushback. Trying to attribute conservative values when it’s basically ‘good guy wins and the family is important’ doesn’t work. It’s not a Trumpian thing, it’s just what people like.”
Indeed, Sheridan’s overt environmentalism, sympathy for animal rights characters and criticism of the treatment of Native Americans has already suffered a Right-wing backlash that declares his shows “too woke”. One thing he’s not is anti-capitalist.
Paramount has gone all in on Sheridan, who has spun off prequel after interconnected prequel including 1883, set in the old West, 1923 starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren as Depression-era ranchers, Lawmen: Bass Reeves, starring David Oyelowo as the real-life first black deputy US marshal as well as forthcoming shows 1944, Yellowstone sequel 2024 – expected to star Matthew McConaughey – and 6666, set on the Four Sixes Ranch in Texas. Sheridan has also written the dramas Mayor of Kingstown, Special Ops: Lioness with Nicole Kidman, Sylvester Stallone’s mob drama Tulsa King and the forthcoming Landman starring Billy Bob Thornton, Demi Moore and Jon Hamm, all for Paramount.
This in itself is quite the business. By one estimate, Paramount is spending $500million a year making Sheridan’s shows. Paramount+ credits the so-called “Sheridanverse” with driving subscriptions – the company has 67.5 million subscribers worldwide, far below Netflix’s 260 million but far ahead of Apple’s 25 million. Bob Bakish, Paramount’s global president and chief executive, credits Sheridan as “critical” to that growth.
“Sheridan’s hit rate right now might be the best in Hollywood,” says industry insider blogger the Entertainment Strategy Guy. “Showrunners fall into two groups – average and elite. Ninety per cent
are average. They make a hit one in every 10 tries, and two other shows are solid. Yellowstone and Sheridan’s spin-off series 1899, and 1923 were all clearly hits. None of his shows have flopped. He’s elite.”
On the back of this success, Sheridan has built a network of commercial projects. These include actor-training cowboy camps at one of his ranches, and renting his ranches, horses, cattle and other holdings to his shows.
A Wall Street Journal investigation found Sheridan’s favourite locations are his own Texas ranches, which he rents to Paramount for as much as $50,000 a week, charging the company $214,000 for his cowboy camps. And at the centre of this empire is the Four Sixes Ranch in Texas, a vast 225-square-mile operation with around 4,000 cows, 200 bulls and 1,000 horses. Sheridan persuaded his production company, 101 Studios, and a New York private equity firm, Yucaipa Companies, to purchase with him for $341million in 2021.
He has already launched a Four Sixes-brand clothing line and a pickup truck as well as Four Sixes beer and home delivery beef, both of which feature prominently in
Yellowstone’s fifth season. But he’s not selfish about product placement. Coors is the show’s official beer partner, Lucky Brand has a denim tie-in and the Yellowstone Product Placement Database lists 376 individual paid-for placements from an Apple MacBook Pro to Carhartt jeans.
In November 2022 Yellowstone’s production company, 101 Studios, launched ShopTheScene, which lets viewers scan a QR code displayed on screen to buy items featured in the show. The premiere of season five, part one allowed viewers to buy everything from cowboy hats ($20) to Dutton’s office chair ($3,200). The site had more than 10,000 visitors per minute at times. While product placement is a production company business, Paramount does well in the branded products line – offering Yellowstone-branded clothing, jewellery, cologne, furniture, food and drink in nearly 2,500 stores as well as an 1883 wine brand and club.
This has not gone unnoticed in Hollywood, where the search for the magic money tree continues in bleak fiscal times. Netflix is preparing to release the old-school old West dramas American Primeval and The Abandons, both set in the 1800s. Primeval is a hyper-violent wagon train drama starring Taylor Kitsch as a gun-toting settler facing Native American warriors, while The Abandons stars Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey as Oregon matriarchs battling corrupt wealthy interests trying to take their family’s land. Amazon, meanwhile, has fast-tracked an as yet unnamed Western from True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto. We are living in Taylor Sheridan’s world, in other words, and Kevin Costner is going to have to learn to live in it too.
‘Yellowstone’ is available to watch on Paramount+
Paramount+ credits the ‘Taylor Sheridan-verse’ with driving subscriptions to 67.5 million users