Filling a red state void

Sometime in the summer of 2018, my phone rang in Los Angeles. It was my brother calling from Montana, where we both grew up and he still lives. He wanted to talk about a new Western television show called “Yellowstone.”

For the first time ever, he said, Hollywood had gotten something right. Everyone in Montana was abuzz about it — his fishing buddies, the local radio hosts, the waitress at Pay’s Cafe down by the livestock auction yards in Billings. What did I think?

Not only had I never watched “Yellowstone,” I had barely even heard about it. Not wanting to be teased out as an out-of-touch coastal elite, I turned the question around: In his opinion, what did the show get so right?

“It romances the Wild West in a modern and relatable way,” he said.

Hmm.

“It’s about greed,” he continued. “All of these no-good, out-of-state real estate developers coming to turn our land into vacation homes for rich people. And one local family fights like hell for that not to happen.”

Ahh. Got it.

For millions of Americans, in particular those in “flyover” states, “Yellowstone” tapped into a deep unease about their changing communities: It captured a political mood with art. Whether unsettled by a diversifying population or the sprouting of McMansions where cows used to graze or simply an intangible dread about what was coming next, people could watch “Yellowstone” and find characters confronting a similar reality — and winning the battle.

John Dutton, the combative “Yellowstone” patriarch, provided a get-off-my-lawn emotional kinship, only his lawn was a verdant ranch the size of Rhode Island. In the first season alone, the Duttons outmaneuver scheming developers from California, kick a busload of Chinese tourists off their property, thwart plans for an abutting casino and punch against environmental regulations they see as overly aggressive.

These storylines and other undercurrents — its love for the Second Amendment, old-timers longing for “the good old days” — spoke to Trump Country like no other scripted show on television.

But labeling “Yellowstone” as red meat for red states, as many big city television critics did, misses part of the reason that people like my brother (who is liberal, or at least rabidly anti-Trump) gravitated to it: They loved that the media establishment couldn’t make heads or tails of its popularity. It made “Yellowstone” feel even more authentically theirs.

Us vs. Them, rigidly so.

Four years after the show debuted, Time magazine was still asking: “But who is watching ‘Yellowstone’? That’s a question that tends to perplex people who write about TV for a living.” The answer? “The average American doesn’t care if the show they watch is nominated for an Emmy or gets attention from some critics,” Katie Bowlby, digital director of Country Living magazine, told Time. “They watch it because it’s entertaining.”

My brother sent me a link to the article not long after it was published, along with the following text message:

“Yup. Sure is. Thanks for city-splaining that to us. LOL.” — Brooks Barnes

A new portrayal of Indigenous characters

“When this land belonged to my people a hundred and fifty years ago,” Monica Dutton (Kelsey Asbille) said in the Season 3 opener, “children were stolen, men were killed, families herded away like cattle, and nothing’s changed.” A member of the fictional “Broken Rock” tribe, she was schooling her white father-in-law, John Dutton III, the fifth-generation owner of the family ranch.

She delivered her parting shot, the episode’s title, without a hint of sarcasm: “Except you’re the Indian now.”

Such is the persuasive power of “Yellowstone.” By equating John’s fate to that of Monica’s Indigenous foreparents, the show sought to render him more victim than victor — even though his sprawling ranch comprises parts of her ancestral home.

In 2018, when I was the only person I knew who had started watching the show, I thought I had stumbled upon something else: a TV series committed to nuanced portrayal of its Native American characters who would be kept near the center of the narrative.

“Longmire,” a neo-Western procedural, had just finished its run. Its white protagonist, the Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire (Robert Taylor), often turned to his Indigenous best friend, Henry Standing Bear (Lou Diamond Phillips), for help; a Cheyenne casino owner, Jacob Nighthorse (A Martinez), was a nemesis. That show’s absence meant the TV landscape had far fewer subtle Native American characters, even if they were sidekicks or secondary to the main story.

When Thomas Rainwater (played by Comanche actor Gil Birmingham) appeared on the very first episode of “Yellowstone,” I naively held on to the show’s promise. The newly elected tribal chair confronts a senator about structural inequality. Rainwater later shares that he was raised as Latino by adoptive parents. After learning his heritage, he earned a Master of Business Administration from Harvard University and began his plan to buy back Dutton family land for his tribe.

Over the next four seasons, despite Rainwater’s ambitions, he and his battle for land repatriation receded further into the background. Not a total surprise. Taylor Sheridan, the show’s creator, had also prioritized white protagonists over the Indigenous figures in the cowboy movie “Come Hell or High Water” and in “Wind River,” a thriller that follows two white law officers as they investigate the murder of a Native American teenage girl played by Asbille. The actress identified herself as Cherokee and Asian American, but her Indigenous ancestry was challenged by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who said she was not an enrolled member of the tribe.

As I tuned in to — and then out from and returned back to — “Yellowstone,” the TV terrain started to change. In 2021, for the first time in TV history, there were three shows with a majority Native American cast: FX’s “Reservation Dogs,” Peacock’s “Rutherford Falls” and AMC’s “Dark Winds.” Their arrivals showed some of the breadth of Indigenous stories through novel characters and rich cultural landscapes.

While Sheridan’s reach has expanded into spinoffs such as “1883” and “1924,” as “Yellowstone” ends, my eye is elsewhere. Sterlin Harjo, one of the creators of the Emmy-nominated “Reservation Dogs,” announced that he is doing another show set in Oklahoma, called “The Sensitive Kind.” I can only hope for more. — Salamishah Tillet

“Man-washing” a soap opera

We all know the hallmarks of the soap opera. Plotlines must be melodramatic and involve a mix of illicit affairs, debilitating illnesses, mysteries around lineage and, of course, coldblooded murder. We are taught — or at least I was taught — that these are cheesy, tired tropes, mostly the fodder of daytime TV, to be indulged while folding the laundry or stuck in a waiting room somewhere.

I was surprised, then, to find those exact themes in “Yellowstone” when I started watching a few years ago. With its high production values and A-list to B-list casting, the show has all the trappings of prestige television. And yet we found the doting son, Jamie Dutton, devastated to discover he’s not a real Dutton but an adopted one. Taylor Sheridan, the showrunner, plays the mysterious shooting of the paterfamilias John Dutton as a contemporary version of the “Who Shot J.R.?” cliffhanger from “Dallas,” one of the seminal soaps of the ’70s and ’80s. The background of the brooding Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) — who killed his father, was saved by the Duttons and ultimately became their ranch hand and fixer, willing to do whatever it takes to protect the family — reads like pulp fiction.

In almost any other context, I’d be embarrassed to watch. And yet, “Yellowstone” works for me. It is a soap opera, yes, but wrapped in the archetypes of what we think of as “traditional” American masculinity. Land. Lineage. Horses. Violence. And a whole lot of denim.

I like to think of it as “man-washing,” a way of laundering melodramatic conventions through male-coded stereotypes. I am OK with Rip and Beth’s decades-long forbidden romance, just as long as I get to see Rip kill an antagonist with a venomous snake, or beat another character to death with a rock. I’m fine with Kayce Dutton and his strained relationship with his father, but only if we get to see him fend off militia members with a .45 while maintaining a mystical relationship with the wolves of the Montana plains. Any amount of cheese can be overlooked with enough whiskey and cowboy hats.

This is not exactly new. Spaghetti Westerns made Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name a model of the strong, silent type, willing to kill while maintaining at least something of a moral center. (That he was covered in sweat while doing it made it all the more appealing.) And more recently, shows such as “Sons of Anarchy” have attempted this in another outlaw context, but with Harleys, drugs and beards instead of six-shooters and stallions.

“Yellowstone” perfected the art of so-called manliness, so much so that some of its millions of viewers never considered it a guilty pleasure and moved directly into stan culture. For under $50, you can buy your very own life-size cardboard cutouts of Rip or Beth. For the less intensely devoted, there is a whiskey decanter with accompanying glassware.

I am not quite at the point where I’m buying Dutton merch (unless they make a Rip Wheeler-style Carhartt in my size). But I am certainly no longer ashamed to say I am “Yellowstone”-pilled. — Mike Isaac

Leveraging NFL games and linear TV

By the time the second season of “Yellowstone” started in 2019, Paramount had a bona fide hit on its hands. It also had a major problem. The company hadn’t yet begun a streaming service, but this was just the kind of crown jewel its competitors were using to build up their subscriber bases — fast. That year, however, the company sold the streaming rights to Peacock, owned by a competitor, NBCUniversal. Bob Bakish, Paramount’s CEO at the time, later called the deal “unfortunate.”

That was an understatement. Season 2 episodes of the cowboy epic reached an average of almost 3 million viewers, airing on Paramount’s nearly unfindable cable network. “Yellowstone” had gained strongholds in midtier markets across the South and Southwest, out-punching its weight in cities such as Charlotte, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; and Albuquerque, New Mexico. If it could hit those numbers in so-called B, C and D counties, TV executives salivated at the prospect of penetrating major markets.

To do so, Chris McCarthy, then the new head of Paramount Network, doubled down on the power of linear TV. First, he cut several of the network’s other scripted productions to focus on “Yellowstone.” Then in June 2020, he moved the show’s air date from Wednesdays to Sundays, simulcasting new “Yellowstone” episodes on four channels — Paramount, Pop, TV Land and CMT — under the company’s umbrella.

“The NFL on Sunday nights was one of the only times when you could bring a massive audience to linear,” said McCarthy, now co-CEO of Paramount Global, “and yet, throughout the history of television, it had been a death sentence for any series trying to go head-to-head.” It was a canny programming bet: NBC’s broadcasts of NFL games in fall and winter are the No. 1 weekly ratings grabber in all of TV, and much of that audience — 18- to 49-year-old men — lacked appointment viewing during other seasons. “Yellowstone” capitalized on that opening.

It paid off, with 6.6 million viewers tuning in live for the Season 3 premiere; first-run episodes that season averaged 3.9 million households on Paramount Network alone. The Season 3 finale, which aired in August 2020, brought in the biggest audience for any scripted cable show that year, up 84% from the show’s Season 2 finale.

After the streaming service Paramount+ debuted in 2021, McCarthy stocked it with “Yellowstone” prequels, studded with A-list casting. Viewers looking to catch up on the suddenly buzzy original still flocked to Peacock, so Paramount Global sought another end-around. In 2023, it began airing reruns on its broadcast network CBS, in one of terrestrial TV’s biggest time slots: in the fall, after the one-two punch of afternoon NFL games and “60 Minutes.” Now it was competing against NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” but with two hugely popular lead-ins.

With those advantages, a block of two rerun “Yellowstone” episodes averaged 6.8 million viewers; half of the audience were first-time watchers. (As part of the fallout from the writers strike in 2023, only one new episode of “Yellowstone” aired on Paramount Network that year. It drew an audience of 11.5 million.)

And now the show’s linear TV streams are fully merged. The CBS audience is caught up with the first-run Paramount Network viewership, just in time for the premiere of the series’ final episodes — to be aired on Sundays. — Elena Bergeron