Now that I have watched the Yellowstone series it has confirmed something that I had suspected, which made it a more urgent project. There is a lot more going on with it than just an entertaining television show. Taylor Sheridan and the gang are making a point and they know who their audience is, which was obvious at the start of Season 5 if you know what you are looking for. Of course, Yellowstone is the popular television show for Paramount Plus, which many have called a love letter to the MAGA political movement. Over the various seasons, Sheridan and the gang obviously struggled with this impression. After all, they are Hollywood lefties and they didn’t want to be viewed by their peers as a bunch of radical right-winged lunatics. However, the show has become increasingly popular over the five seasons because the topic of a modern Western has captured the hearts and minds of an audience hungry for content that represents their concerns. Taylor Sheridan has become a scorching commodity since all the shows he’s producing suddenly are doing very well, not just with Yellowstone, but also the spin-off shows like 1883, 1923, and Bass Reeves. There are more in the works, but these are all excellent shows, and in my wildest dreams, I never thought I’d see them on television. They remind me of the old westerns I grew up with, like Gunsmoke and Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie, and I didn’t think Hollywood could produce anything like that ever again. However, with Taylor Sheridan and Kevin Costner, along with others, there is a revolt against Hollywood that has been going on in Montana and Texas, which has its own kinetic energy that is giving voice to America, which is crying out for its own existence.
If you’ve ever dealt with Hollywood types you will know that they are cosmetically, outright Marxists. But around the catering truck, they are like everyone else. They are mostly Marxists because they have to be to get work, and the financiers of their projects want global communism; otherwise, their projects don’t get greenlit. But on rare occasions, sometimes you can flip the script on that process, and when someone like Taylor Sheridan is successful, the greed factor takes over, and the finance people forget about Marxism and turn to the glitter and glory of massive profit, which is one of the great attributes of capitalism. Yellowstone is not a show that could have been made for state-run television. It is a love letter to the foundation of America, and it is oozing in patriotism. With the success that Taylor Sheridan has found with these projects, he is moving in a more obvious direction politically, which is similar to what we’ve seen with Elon Musk, President Trump, and Joe Rogan, all people who voted Democrat but have changed over time, based on what they have seen. At the beginning of Season 5, when John Dutton becomes governor of Montana to essentially save his ranch from developers who want to build an airport, during the swearing-in scene, there is a long pause before putting his hand on the Bible, where Kevin Costner is throwing obvious red meat to the Hollywood community. The purpose of the scene was to show that the Yellowstone production had not gone native and thrown their lot in with God, even though Kevin Costner does end up doing so and swearing to protect the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. But the scene’s purpose, even if Taylor Sheridan will never admit to it, was to throw the Hollywood Reporter types into a tailspin of doubt. Because the rest of the season, the next eight episodes are a love letter to American life that I never thought I’d see in a Hollywood production again.
In real life, Sheridan and much of the cast have found themselves enamored by the majesty of the flyover states, which has rarely happened to famous Hollywood personalities. And rather than hiding from it, they have embraced it more. In the case of Sheridan, he has bought ranches and is desperately trying to tell the story of everyday Americans in this struggle with a true phantom menace of Marxism without calling it that. There are many parts of Season 5 in Yellowstone where Beth Dutton, the daughter of John Dutton and the apparent future of the show, delivers some of the best pro-American lines that have ever been done in entertainment, on the level of Clint Eastwood and John Wayne. And they were possible because of that setup of ambiguity at the start of the season with the Bible. Usually, with these kinds of projects and the success that comes with them, any romantic notions that a producer like Taylor Sheridan receives take the ambition out of the projects, and they become more corporate as more people are interested in attaching themselves to the success. But not here; Yellowstone has become more authentic. And even though they probably find the idea repulsive, Yellowstone is more MAGA in the notion of Make America Great Again. They may not want to admit that they like President Trump. However, they are after the same things Trump and his supporters wish for in life. We want our country, and we want to love it. America is speaking and doing so loudly at the heart of the Yellowstone series and all the Taylor Sheridan projects.
I don’t think Yellowstone planned to be this way from the beginning. But what it has ended up becoming, and Taylor Sheridan himself, is an authentic love letter to the creation of America. As I became more interested in these Taylor Sheridan shows, I caught him on a podcast with Joe Rogan talking about the western 1883 and the genuine plight of a new nation needing to fulfill the needs of Manifest Destiny, where advertisements around the world were begging people to come and settle America for a piece of it. And much of the world, under various forms of tyranny and the early versions of Marxism, wanted more than anything to have a piece of their own life, even if it meant having to come and fight Indians to the death just for the opportunity. Taylor Sheridan, throughout his various television series, is grappling with this problem, and it all leans toward the reasons America needed to exist in the first place and is stepping away from the Hollywood Marxism that has so ruined entertainment to its present condition. And because of all that, people love Yellowstone and the other Taylor Sheridan projects. I am indeed a fan. There is some real heart in what is being produced around the Yellowstone series, much better than The Godfather or Dallas, which it has been compared to. Yellowstone is a love letter to America that has needed to happen for a long time. And it’s a story told by people going through their own transformation into patriotism. I have always been conservative. But I am happy to see more people becoming that way as they learn the real history of America, even if it takes success to free them enough to have that point of view. Watching Yellowstone is worth the effort to get to Season 5. And whatever happens in the future with the show, what has happened up to this point can’t be undone. It’s part of America’s story now; and many people will be better because of it.
Rich Hoffman
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