Its critics in the media get it wrong, though. As that linked article notes:
Reason reports that “media elites” are mystified by the success of “Yellowstone”: “It is not… saying anything grand or sweeping about our world.”
That's totally wrong, and the linked article gives an account of why. What "Yellowstone" is about is resistance to the fact that our whole economic and political system destroys traditional ways of life, forces settled people to become nomads, wipes out communities and families and homes. Nearly all human meaning derives from relationships with others: family, church, community, home. These are the things inexorably destroyed by the very system that sustains us.
These forces are titanic, and we both depend on them and struggle against them with all our might. When they win -- the county I grew up in was completely destroyed by the expansion of Atlanta, its way of life gone, almost all the people I grew up with forced into exile by rising property taxes and costs that could only be bone by the richer new arrivals -- they destroy almost all the meaning in our lives. Communities and churches are broken up when the congregation splits up and moves. Maybe family can survive in other places; maybe they can maintain their relationships in spite of the new distance and the fact they never see each other anymore. No one visits my father's grave down in Georgia. My mother and sister now live in Idaho. I haven't seen them in years. I have no idea where the friends of my youth now live. They aren't the sort of people who join Facebook, so they have vanished as completely as a sailor slipping beneath the waves.
Nothing grand or sweeping? This is almost everything. Only the one thing they leave out -- God, the hope of the dying -- remains when all these things are lost. Even God, for those who are neither hermits nor prophets, is harder to hear and know without a church.
"Yellowstone" is a fantasy because we usually can't sustain and survive. But it does lay out the task: hold the line as long as you can. Oppose progress in all its forms. No more roads; no more improvement. No more government, no more control.
No more of any of it. No more.
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That's sort of the recent history of Jackson County, specifically the Tuckaseegee and Little Canada areas and the area around Lake Glenville.
When we moved there from SoCal in the summer of '75, Cullowhee was a sleepy little college town. Sylva to anywhere was by curvy two lane roads. The lakes above Tuckaseegee were accessible to everyone. Even Cashiers, although a resort town since before the turn of the 20th century, was a sleepy little town.
Most of the land around the lakes and in Little Canada was owned either by timber companies or Nantahala Power Company. Then beginning around 1980, Duke Power bought out Nantahala Power and started selling large parcels of land around the lakes to developers. The timber companies followed suit. Some of the poorer families that were land rich and cash poor sold their family heritage and now, there is limited access to the lakes for the public. The sides of the mountains in the surrounding areas are dotted with the second and third homes of the rich from various other parts of the country, mostly Atlanta and South Florida.
Having lived in Atlanta through the 80's, I saw and participated in the expansion outward beyond the perimeter of the city by the rich and upper middle class, being a carpenter by trade and working in commercial construction. And to be honest, I also participated in the expansion of the areas around Cashiers, building new homes for the same types of people, from the 90's onward.
There's one thing that's a constant; change is inevitable and "progress" is a machine that grinds inexorably onward, no matter how many of us try to stand in it's way and stop it.
I tried, it, but I soon realized I didn't like any of the characters. This is pretty much standard for today's miniseries. I like to have somebody I can root for.
Sam Elliott was asked about Yellowstone and he said he doesn't like the series. He equated it with a western soap opera like Dallas.
Sam Elliot is a Hollywood guy, so he's thinking in terms of genre and conventions. It's true that Yellowstone is significantly different from a traditional Western in several respects.
The reason Lars doesn't like the characters is also why it doesn't strike Elliot as a true Western. The underlying philosophy -- which they don't become explicit about until nearly the end of the third season -- is that of Nietzsche. That's why God is explicitly dismissed from the world in the pilot, morality is treated as a function of honor and relationships rather than good or evil, and indeed adherence to a traditional morality as a trap that the powerful use to control the weak. (In the final episode of the third season, one of the characters invokes 'slave' versus 'master' morality by name; another one invokes Nietzsche.)
If you watch it long enough, you come to find that most of the characters you don't like are deeply sympathetic figures in different ways. The good ones are honorable and loyal, even though they're murderers; all of them on every side, I think, sooner or later. The bad ones are also murderers, but lack loyalty or honor. The priest at least isn't a murderer, just a liar.
Because there's no God, there's no redemption and no salvation except to die as you chose to live. It is not a Christian show at all, but I don't think Hollywood can make those anymore.
"There's one thing that's a constant; change is inevitable and "progress" is a machine that grinds inexorably onward, no matter how many of us try to stand in it's way and stop it."
Absolutely true. When I talk to people about the need for more housing units here in California, one think I talk about is no matter that I don't like the changes, you can't freeze the world in amber, alas. It would be dead then. I've yet to figure out how to make the growth better than it is. The planners are all pretty much communists now, which doesn't help.
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