Over the last five years, “Yellowstone” has blazed a Montana trail into the annals of television history. Despite Season 1 not being especially well-received by critics, fans continued to show up for the Paramount series, and today, it’s one of the most popular shows on the small screen, with fans eagerly awaiting Season 5, Part 2.
While the saga of the Dutton clan and their attempts to hold onto their land is a fictional tale, “Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan says that he did draw from real-life issues that plague every corner of America. However, he noted that the reason he chose the setting for the show was to make the encroachment of land developers feel that much more dramatic and urgent.
“These issues of land development, resource mismanagement, oppression, and extreme poverty and inequity in government — they exist here,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “But when it happens in a small area, in a rural area … because there’s fewer people, the consequences seem much more acute. When you start seeing Costcos in a landscape of farms and ranches, it’s much more dramatic than if they jam one in the San Fernando Valley.”
Costner and Sheridan found a lot of commonality as storytellers
Though Kevin Costner and Taylor Sheridan may not be getting on so well these days, as the two are at odds over behind-the-scenes details, leading to Kevin Costner’s “Yellowstone” exit drama, it turns out that they once held a lot in common. “There’s a lot of similarities in the way that Kevin and I story-tell, and, of course, he started storytelling first, so a lot of it influenced me greatly,” Sheridan said, citing Costner’s own 1991 best picture Oscar winner, “Dances with Wolves.”
“When John Dunbar goes to receive his post, and there’s the colonel who’s going insane at the edge of the prairie,” he recalled of Costner’s film, “he was somehow disgraced on the front lines or never got to go to the front lines and drank himself into oblivion … and here he is in hell.”
Much like Sheridan’s “Yellowstone,” “Dances with Wolves” examines how a man must adapt or die as times change and the old ways fade. Furthermore, the movie is also heavily focused on how Native Americans were treated by European settlers, an issue that Sheridan’s work has repeatedly explored in a more modern setting. “He captured that scene authentically,” Sheridan said of a key moment in Costner’s film. “I still remember sitting in the theater and watching it.” While the “Yellowstone” creator and its star aren’t quite as cordial as they once were, it’s clear that they share some similarities, even if it may no longer be enough to allow them to find common ground.
