Have you seen Yellowstone yet? I just saw the first season of it and was very impressed. This series, written by Taylor Sheridan, should appeal to fans of Dallas, fans of shows about families in the ranching business, and fans of modern Westerns.
With Yellowstone, Writer Taylor Sheridan and Executive Producer Kevin Costner have practically reinvented the Western genre. It's still cowboys and indians, but done in an extremely modern way. The second season is scheduled to begin this April.
In Yellowstone, Kevin Costner plays John Dutton, the patriarch of a 4th generation ranching family who own the largest ranch in Montana. The Dutton family, which happens to be a fairly dysfunctional family (as all families in modern TV shows tend to be), is being attacked by all sides from people who want to take their land and/or put them out of business. Their main enemy is the chief of the Broken Rock Reservation - Thomas Rainwater. He's a very bitter man who is obsessed with gaining ownership of The Yelowstone Ranch. He uses his heritage as his excuse for wanting to take Yellowstone away from the Duttons, but actually his motivation isn't his heritage - it's his own greed. Rainwater cannot stand to see John Dutton doing better than he's doing. He covets the land Dutton owns and wants it for himself.
The other primary enemy of the Dutton family is a billionaire from California named Dan Jenkins. He's a real estate developer who wants to build right next to the Yellowstone Ranch with the hope of eventually getting his hands on The Yellowstone. He and Rainwater meet and find out they have similar goals. They discuss forming a partnership.
Along with these two enemies, the Duttons also have to deal with government agencies such as The EPA who are also causing trouble for them. In essence, there is an entire army mobilizing against the Duttons and other families like them, wanting to put an end to the American way of life.
It's a fascinating series and is beautifully filmed on location. It's actually made more like a very long movie than as a conventional TV series. This "long movie" format appealed to Costner because of the opportunity it gives to delve more deeply into the characters' personalities and tell the story in more detail than it otherwise could have been told. If it were a movie it would be rated R, as it was made for the Paramount network which apparently doesn't censor its shows the way most networks do. Yellowstone is the kind of series you would expect to find on HBO or Showtime.
