Yellowstone changing hearts, minds and appetites

By Sheri Monk
sherimonk@gmail.com

Every once in a while, a series is released that seems to really capture the imaginations of people far and wide. Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Vikings, The Sopranos and Stranger Things are just a few that come to mind from recent years, but none have featured the cattle industry as their hook.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock and unless that rock has absolutely terrible Internet, you’ve heard of Yellowstone. Not the park, but the (so far) four season series based on a ranch located on the border of the park. The show opens with a shot of blue sky spotted by white clouds as a tentative hand reaches into, then across the screen to a horse’s head. We hear the wind in the background at first, but then we hear the horse, and it’s in distress. The hand belongs to family patriarch John Dutton, played by Kevin Costner. He’s bleeding from a head wound that he doesn’t seem to notice. “Easy, easy,” he whispers to the animal. The horse calms. Dutton sighs, then places his head to that of the horse. He closes his eyes. “It’s not fair, this life.”

The camera pans out, and Dutton and his horse are in the background of a terrible highway wreck. We see a truck, wheels in the air, and a piece of construction equipment. Then the camera brings us back to man and horse, and we see its horrific injury, entangled with a piece of unrecognizable metal, probably the trailer it had been carried in. “I know you deserve better,” he says, raising his revolver. “Best I can offer you is peace,” he says. Dutton touches his face to the horse’s once more. The gun fires. The horse drops. Dutton walks away from the tragedy, grief hanging heavy on his frame as he picks his cowboy hat off of the pavement.

“It was too much for my sister-in-law. She couldn’t watch it. She’s a city girl. She’s never been exposed to the realities of country life. The idea of having to put down an animal to speed the process of death to spare it is nothing that she would experience,” said Heather Lukito, a school teacher and mom of three from Milton, Ontario. Milton has a population of 110,000, but it’s considered just a suburb of Toronto – just a town, by local standards.

“Most people that have lived a suburban life, unless they’ve had somewhere they could go and see the country life like that, even the thought of a gun is not part of reality for most. Most have never even seen a gun,” she said.

Back to the series opener, with hat in one hand, revolver in the other, Dutton walks, surveying the wreck, finding a dead driver in a smoking semi. He reaches around the dead man, retrieving the registration from the crushed dash. The truck and trailer belongs Paradise Valley Capital Development. This sets the viewer up for one of the prevailing themes of the show, a bloody and desperate battle between land uses and lifestyles in the ever-present war for resources. And if there’s one thing the series does well, it’s showing us that when one human side invariably wins, we all lose – including the land and the plants and animals forced to share it with us.

Heather is hooked on the show, and she’s been binging on it since December. She’s almost through season four. ViacomCBS has already announced a fifth season and there are – count them – already THREE spinoffs. So why does this show resonate so strongly with viewers?

“I think in this era of mass TV and production, Yellowstone seems more real. If you look at set design, there’s a lot of stage set-ups and you can tell… they’re always in this office, or they’re always in this building. This show is shot out on a ranch. Sure you have the house and maybe Beth’s office, but the majority is shot out on the prairie. It opens you up and it feels refreshing,” says Stephen Philpott, a Medicine Hat film buff and co-host of podcast “Scent of a Man”.

There may be other reasons very urban viewers feel such solidarity with Yellowstone’s characters. Modest, semi-detached homes are selling in Heather’s neighbourhood for close to $1.5 million.

“The show is a fight for land. We’ve seen that here,” said Heather. “That’s been corrupted here as well. Those who had land have done very well as they sold to developers.”

“The characters themselves are super compelling and I’m attached to every one of them. Kevin Costner is a stand-out actor and this is the best I’ve seen him in a long time. He was made to play this role. Kelly Reilly as Beth is the one that has kept me in the series the most because she takes me through so many waves of up and down. I hate her or I love her,” laughs Stephen.

Beth Dutton, arguably the only main character who is also a woman, is a fierce train wreck, but capable of anything and everything. Successful, powerful and unapologetic, she comes equipped with a foul mouth, strong libido and an impressive alcohol tolerance. She can also be astonishingly vulnerable. Her partner, ranch hand Rip Wheeler, is one of the shows biggest draws – particularly to those who appreciate the male form. But there are plenty of other cowboys to lust after, including Beth’s brother Casey, and of course, John Dutton.

The series has some Canadian connections too. Acadia Valley’s Teren Turner played a masked and armed bad guy in an episode. And fans raved when the Calgary Stampede was given a pretty enthusiastic nod when character Lloyd Pierce, the cow boss, talks about earning his buckle at the Calgary Stampede, stating that it was his favourite rodeo and that people were nice to him for 10 straight days.

“Who is my favourite cowboy? It’s obvious. Like many it’s probably Rip,” laughs Julie Mont, a francophone fan who lives in downtown Montreal. She doesn’t own a vehicle, and takes the subway to work. “Yellowstone makes me want to become a cowboy.”

The sweeping landscapes and beauty of the prairie and foothills are part of why she became hooked on the series. “The scenes are so beautiful and the animals look amazing.”

Heather has been equally moved by the landscape and she would like to visit western Canada for the first time because of the show. When asked how long she would have to drive from her home in Ontario before she could find a gravel road and not encounter another car for an hour, she was stunned by the possibility.

“Where I could drive for an hour? And not see another vehicle?! Oh my goodness. Not see another vehicle? For an hour? I’d have to drive for 11 hours. I’ve never been there. I have never driven and not seen a car for another hour.”

Yellowstone has captured the imagination of viewers just like Heather and Julie in every major city in the world. And that may have more of an effect on social licence issues than all the combined marketing by beef groups to date.

“There’s been this push toward veganism, and I’ve seen that perspective too, yet even just with this show it feels like no, there’s another side to that story. We can’t lose that industry,” Heather said. “It definitely makes me think about it a little more. I think in the GTA, we tend to all think that our food just comes from the grocery store. We know cognitively it comes from the farmer, but are we thinking of the farmer every day? No.”

“What I really liked from the beginning, for me it was a new discovery. To see the cattle industry, the ranch and the role of the cowboy… I had a lot of biases and cowboys were very negative. To see it is actually very different than I thought. It’s what got me intrigued. I just wanted to know more about it. And the first three reasons I thought it was more about the role of the cowboy and the relationship with the reservation nearby,” Julie explained.

The show gets dark in a Breaking Bad meets The Sopranos kind-of way. Every single character is both a protagonist and an antagonist, and there is no such thing as redemption on Yellowstone. And the fans love it.

“It’s inspiring. Even if their way of doing it is questionable, it’s inspiring,” Julie said, admitting that ranching in real life probably doesn’t require quite as many one-way trips to the train station. “It has been a discovery and it gave me the impression that through this story I could learn a lot about this world. It is a culture in itself. It’s not at all like we see in the movies.”