With Yellowstone Season 5 set to unleash frontier vengeance this weekend, creator Taylor Sheridan has been making the interview rounds to promote a series that, frankly, doesn’t need a whole lot of help. Despite the advent of streaming, Yellowstone has been one of the rare basic cable hits. The show routinely brings in millions of viewers who tune in each week to see what fresh hell John Dutton (Kevin Costner) will exact on anyone reckless enough to come for his Montana ranch.
The show’s neo-western setting and heavily armed ranch hands have made it a pop culture juggernaut for conservative viewers, but if you tell Sheridan that the show is a Republican drama made for Republicans, he’ll literally laugh. Via The Atlantic:
Sheridan insists that Yellowstone is not a “red-state show.” “They refer to it as ‘the conservative show’ or ‘the Republican show’ or ‘the red-state Game of Thrones,’ ” he told me. “And I just sit back laughing. I’m like, ‘Really?’ The show’s talking about the displacement of Native Americans and the way Native American women were treated and about corporate greed and the gentrification of the West, and land-grabbing. That’s a red-state show?”
As The Atlantic notes, Yellowstone‘s politics don’t easily fit into one box or the other. Despite the seemingly conservative staples like guns, a yearning for “traditional” values, and masculine violence, the show also grapples with anti-capitalist themes as well as environmental destruction. According to Sheridan, this ambiguity is deliberate and part of his dedication to “responsible storytelling” that shows the “moral consequences of certain behaviors and decisions.”
“When I stepped into that world, I wanted there to be real consequences,” Sheridan told The Atlantic. “I wanted to never, ever shy away from, This was the price.”
Yellowstone Season 5 premieres November 13 on the Paramount Network.
(Via The Atlantic)