Yellowstone

Shortly into the first episode of Landman, Billy Bob Thornton’s protagonist, Tommy Morris, is talking with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Ainsley, at a college football game. He's just met her quarterback boyfriend, and Tommy asks her if they’re being careful having sex. She replies yes and that they have one rule they stick by. Apologies in advance. “As long as he never cums in me, he can come anywhere on me,” she says. Thornton holds a comic frozen stare and excuses himself to get a Dr. Pepper. It’s funny and crude and has been seen by millions on YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram Reels. But it does nothing to move the story along.

When Kevin Costner announced that he would not be returning to Yellowstone, the contemporary Western series that revitalized his career, the news was greeted with consternation. Costner had been the pivotal figure in the show’s previous four and a half seasons — and it was expected that he would return as the patriarch John Dutton III for the final installment, even though he was busy filming his own epic pictures, Horizon. However, amid well-documented spats between him and the show’s creator Taylor Sheridan, Costner announced that he would not, in fact, return for Yellowstone’s final episodes.   Rather than leaving the door open for a final, face-saving cameo, Sheridan dealt with Costner in brutal fashion.

When Brian Robbins, CEO of Paramount Studios, addressed the company in a town hall meeting on Tuesday, he was not in celebratory mood. Amid the grim and downbeat words he had to utter — “We know what a difficult and disruptive period it has been. And while we cannot say that the noise will disappear, we are here today to lay out a go-forward plan that can set us up for success no matter what path the company chooses to go down” — the news that the studio’s profits have declined by 61 precent over the past five years was described by Showtime CEO Chris McCarthy as “simply unacceptable.” Paramount is in big trouble. The only questions now are why, and what can be done to ameliorate the situation?

Although this year’s Cannes Film Festival hasn’t concluded yet (it runs until this Saturday), there is a general sense that the true talking-point pictures have been frontloaded into the opening week, both in competition and out of it. Without doubt, the one that has attracted the most attention is Francis Ford Coppola’s sci-fi epic Megalopolis, which premiered last Thursday to a mixture of outright scorn and bemused but respectful appreciation, all of which suggests that, although it still lacks a US distributor, it will keep making waves upon its release later this year — although the chances of Coppola regaining anything like his $120 million investment are slim, to say the least.

One of the most popular shows today is the Paramount Network’s Yellowstone, which follows the Dutton family, led by Kevin Costner's John Dutton, who owns and runs one of the largest ranches in the country, the Yellowstone Ranch in Montana. The sprawling cattle ranch, owned by several generations of Duttons, is under constant threat by scheming developers, environmental activists and Native Americans seeking historical justice, not to mention the forces of globalization that threaten to run the family legacy out of business. Writer and director Taylor Sheridan’s hit series has been praised for its breathtaking cinematography, complex characters, gritty realism and modern relevance.

A neo-Western drama set on a vast ranch in Montana run through with trashy romance plot lines and violent disputes about land and legacy — "who owns the West?" — has made Yellowstone the most-watched TV series in America. The season four finale drew over 11 million viewers. And yet, while millions of Americans are lapping up the epic sprawl of violence, lust, family and wilderness, many — particularly the coastal intelligentsia — don’t watch it. One vocal exception is Joyce Carol Oates, the Pulitzer-nominated author of fifty-nine novels and one of the great chroniclers of the last American century.

My wife, who spent much of her childhood in Northern California — and whose grandparents owned orchard land and kept horses and other animals — always laughs at me during our yearly trip to the county fair. The reason is my fear of walking past the horse stalls. I’m a transplant to rural Michigan from New York City. Farm animals were an abstraction for most of my life. I pass by rows of Clydesdales, hindquarters facing me on either side in uncomfortable proximity, and imagine my own demise if one should decide to kick. My father is no horseman, but he's had a long career in manufacturing. He can make or fix most anything. (Once, in the ‘70s, he fell from a catwalk onto a floor where F-14 Tomcats were being assembled below.