Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone pilot is a slog with great views
The burgeoning Paramount Network (formerly Spike TV) has a hit on its hands with its underwhelming new series, Yellowstone, a sprawling melodrama set in Montana but mostly shot in Park City, Utah. Taylor Sheridan created the show, as well as wrote and directed the pilot. This is the busy boy behind 2015’s Sicario (so goddamn good; I am determined to like the upcoming sequel no matter what!), Hell or High Water (2016) and Wind River (2017). Yellowstone stars Kevin Costner as John Dutton, owner of the largest ranch in these here parts. Gosh almighty, everybody wants a piece of Dutton’s land and the cattle that graze it, from a nearby Indian reservation to land developers and the titular Yellowstone National Park.
Beyond that, it’s kind of hard to tell what’s going on. There are a lot of moving parts and heavy-handed character introductions to contend with (Idea for a comedy spin-off: Whose Cow is it, Anyway?). The show opens with Costner wading in the aftermath of an accident on one of those iconic stretches of empty Montana highway, with the mountains far off and the big sky sprawling out in every direction. There’s a dead guy in the overturned semi and a bleeding horse on the brink. Costner shoots the horse and looks bored and tired doing it. Always it is this way with mercy kills in a Western prologue: We are at once trapped in this life and victims of a changing world, the gun blast seems to say. Your death represents the end of an era, horse, and yet there’s beauty in the tragedy, and so on and so forth.
Costner’s character has four grown children, each of them fulfilling a different role in the Dutton Family empire. We open with Jamie the lawyer (Wes Bentley) in a court proceeding over eminent domain. Bozeman wants a piece of the Dutton land to develop subdivisions (“If we don’t grow, we die”) and the Dutton family is all like, “No.” Next up is Beth (Kelly Reilly), who we see as a pretty and heartless corporate monster engaged in a boardroom massacre on behalf of the Dutton empire, followed swiftly by a terribly written scene where she humiliates a married man with the gall to hit on her at a bar. You may remember Reilly as the redhead from season 2 of True Detective, and tragically there are parallels between the disappointing writing we saw in that season and the heavy-handed, lawless nonsense we get in episode 1 of Yellowstone. But hey, I wound up liking season 2 of True Detective despite its badness, so you never know.
Lee Dutton (Dave Annable) is a born rancher and faithful to father, not much to say there. Luke Grimes as Cory Dutton seems to be the lead kid. He’s a real cowboy in a world filled with competing agendas. He wrangles wild horses alongside his Native American wife Monica (Kelsey Asbille), who is maybe one of the top 10 prettiest women I’ve ever seen? She says the words, “supper’s ready” and I almost believe her. With such a statue of perfection, I don’t know, seems like they could have at least smeared some dirt on her face.
The premiere episode of Yellowstone is a bit of a slog, punctuated by some promising moments. There is real talent attached to this series. Costner is and has always been good, and we get enough Montana exteriors that it looks and feels well enough like home to me. Let’s give it one more episode and see.