Why Yellowstone is TV's most important show

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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...aylor-sheridan

The most popular show in America works because it focuses on one of the oldest conflicts in the US: land.

Elamin Abdelmahmoud
BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on November 22, 2022 at 1:31 pm

Sometime in July, I got COVID and exiled myself to my basement for six days. I periodically emerged for food, or a few minutes in the backyard, but for the most part I stuck to isolation. My only companions were bottles of Gatorade and Paramount+’s hit TV show Yellowstone. Over five days, I watched the four available seasons of the show.

Yellowstone follows John Dutton, played by a gruff and grave Kevin Costner, a sixth-generation Montana rancher desperately trying to fend off the forces threatening to take the titular ranch — be it the city slicker gentrifiers, the neighboring (fictional) Native American tribe, or the various elements of government. On the sixth day, I anxiously started the series again. I’d noticed that, more than any other show on television, its politics were working on me without me ever being open to them. Somehow, by the time I finished a season of Yellowstone, I found myself just a little more libertarian than I ever thought I would be. How does this show do that? What mechanisms does it use to pull off this magic trick?

Yellowstone only debuted in the summer of 2018, but it’s already outdated to call it a mere TV show. The vast and ever-expanding world, helmed by creator Taylor Sheridan, can now be considered a proper universe. (Indeed, the folks at Paramount refer to something called The “Taylorverse.”) A prequel series, Yellowstone 1883, aired last year, while its follow-up, Yellowstone 1923, arrives in December. Spinoff 6666 will debut next year, and we’re already in spinoff-of-a-prequel territory: Bass Reeves, a spinoff from 1883, is due next year as well.

In its relatively short existence, Yellowstone has become America’s most-watched TV show — last week’s Season 5 premiere averaged 16 million viewers, making it the most-watched TV show of this year and the highest cable season premiere since The Walking Dead in 2017. Its popularity has jumped significantly since Season 4 ended, and specifically, its popularity jumped 60% among younger audiences. Numbers like these once befuddled the tiny but loud crowd of people whose job it is to write about TV on the internet, but we’re thankfully past the stage of being surprised at Yellowstone’s popularity.

Yellowstone features a whole raft of significant social tensions and myths crashing against each other. It may not be television’s best show, but because of its extraordinary popularity and its willingness to play with the existential crises over land, identity, and power, there is little doubt that it is America’s most important drama right now.