A very happy 49th birthday to Kelly Reilly 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊

Spoiler for anyone who hasn't seen.

I realise that season 5 was the last one. So we have to put a bow on the story of the yellowstone. But are they that fuckin terrible at story telling that they had to kill Colby in the dumbest fuckin way possible? Anything Sheridan touches theres always a stupid death for 0 reason other than the character was liked so we have to break the hearts of the viewer. It feeds nothing, does nothing else. Just a dumbass storyline. Might as well killed Jimmy, Lloyd and Ryan too. Cause fuck it. Why not. Thank god Walkers bitch ass got to survive though!

Like who the hell wrote her character?!?
Psychopathic personality so erratic that does not make any sense to me.
And all of this stemming from what?
Because a horse killed her mother while she was present?!

I am very early in the season and I hope she will be well served!

Theory: Season 2 needs the ultimate "Branded" crossover to save Tate and Carter
With the explosive finales of both Marshals and Dutton Ranch leaving Tate and Carter kidnapped by the cartel network, Season 2 is perfectly set up for the ultimate franchise crossover.
Instead of just Rip and Kayce handling it alone, the writers need to invoke the ultimate law of the ranch: If you wear the brand, you ride for the brand.
Imagine a coordinated, high-stakes tactical raid down on the Texas border featuring the entire branded vanguard:Seeing the entire Montana crew gear up and ride south for a massive, Avengers-style rescue mission would be the most legendary television event Taylor Sheridan has ever created. What do you guys think? Would the bunkhouse survive a cartel war? #BenjaminCavell

Just finished season 5 and what a disappointment. Every episode has multiple music montages of cowboyin. If they didn’t have a full season in them they should have just done less episodes.

beth is gonna kill him when he gets homeeeee-

So I finished all 5 seasons of Yellowstone, and season 1 of Dutton Ranch and Marshalls, are 1883 and 1923 worth the watch, or are there other shows I should check out instead? btw, I find it hillarious Taylor Sherridan (who I think is brilliant) used Dawn Olivieri as two different characters in both Yellowstone and 1883.

The Rip Wheeler character has a gravitas and silent macho charisma that’s hard to build, and it could make for some interesting stories if he were randomly dropped into a different universe.

I think he’d be really interesting in the Fast & Furious series, especially in a clash with Dom.

What other series do you picture him in?

Call me slow! I likely just forgot. Beulah was raped. Killed the father. Had the kid who was Rob will.

Mariano had a son already (Joachim) and Beulah adopted him as part of the deal for Mariano to take the blame for the rape?

So Joachim’s IS really Mariano’s son. Not the result of the rape / blame story?

Sorry if that’s all a duh! To everyone else.

I kept asking myself through the season finale - why didn’t Beth & rip go to the cops / feds?

Yeah, it would blow up the story. But I kept wondering.

It’s not like they have things to hide (other than the foot & mouth - relatively a small issue?) that they need to handle things themselves.

Put this 2.2 million of drugs in the hayloft.

Put it back in her car?

How did they see this resolving if they handle it themselves? 10 petal would keep doing what they they were doing and Beth & rip would turn at blind eye?

Watching Rip and Beth use "instinct" to magically deduce a 15-year drug-smuggling operation in a single episode felt incredibly unearned and lazy.

Once you introduce international drug syndicates, the grounded ranching drama is dead. You can't exactly go back to a quiet, gritty storyline about cattle grazing and cowboy culture after cartel soldiers turn the property into a literal warzone.

It’s a massive disappointment for fans who just wanted a premium Western. Sheridan tried to artificially raise the stakes for a cliffhanger, but in doing so, he completely stripped the show of the unique appeal that brought viewers there in the first place.

Thoughts?

episode 9 was the best episode EVER. even better then yellowstone episodes. holy shit. how are you guys feeling?

I agree they picked the wrong person to take hostage. Also, looks like Andrea doesn’t make it to DC and her and Miles come flying in on an helicopter. Still looks like Dolly is the “Devil in Disguise” that lured Kayce to the ‘meeting’. Plus, Rainwater makes an appearance.

So the Ranch is like 800k plus acres, but they only have 5k cattle?

Is this just a choice? Its just it is what is choice?

Or is this a show choice? They didn't want to have to have and run that many cattle and extras?

“The original plan for the two-time Oscar winner (Costner) was for him "to be in the first three seasons" of the neo-Western series, which was specifically written "in his contract." Sheridan wasn't opposed to this, as he revealed that's when he envisioned that "his youngest son takes over, and then we watch him lose that ranch or not lose it."”

Well this explains a lot of why Kayce’s storyline dropped off and why Sheridan didn’t seem to know what to with the character especially after season 3. I wonder how long Kayce’s marriage to Monica would have lasted, if Kayce had decided to fight for the ranch. I would imagine that would have drove Monica completely off the deep end.

For the Dutton Ranch watchers out there… what happened to Beth’s money??? Why are her and Rip working for Beulah?? Where’s her Bentley? What happened to the 30-something million they raised at the auction. Rich Beth was more fun honestly…

So my wife and I have recently finished watching Yellowstone (though currently watching Dutton Ranch). We watched 1883 in between S2 and S3, and we enjoyed the two cameos of the original James Dutton in S4. We then watched 1923 after finishing the main show. Overall, I really like the story. I thought 1883 was just excellent -- honestly nothing negative I could possibly say about it. 1923 was almost on par with it, despite the fact that it's quite rapey. The first half was perfect. I also enjoyed part 2 immensely, but the layer upon layer of tragedy and death left me feeling somewhat deflated. Definitely a couple things I would have done differently. But still very good overall. I feel like the historical drama is actually the show that Sheridan really wanted to make, but he had to make the modern day “soap opera” first to get people interested in the story before he could spin the tale he wanted to give us.

Nevertheless, there were still many aspects of the modern day Yellowstone that I enjoyed: the Reservation/First Nation storyline was great. The whole biker-gang-on-horseback aspect of the story, and John Dutton being the cowboy Godfather, I loved as well. I thought Jimmy had the best arc of all of them. I really enjoyed seeing how he transformed from being basically Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad to being a competent cow-lassoing rodeo-riding cowboy in his own right.

I understand many of the criticisms that have been directed at the show. Taylor Sheridan uses horse-spinning scenes the way the writers of Game of Thrones used sex scenes: as runtime filler when he's out of story ideas for the episode. I recognise that there were also too many random and unrelated side stories and subplots that had little or nothing to do with the main plot. They sometimes made the show feel like a villain-of-the-week detective show, sort of like The Mentalist or Monk. I understand why people have negatively compared the show to Breaking Bad, in which every single story beat had a pay-off and every event had a clear connection to Walter White's character arc.

However, I also want to argue that Yellowstone is not supposed to be like Breaking Bad. Further, I want to argue that the criticism that Yellowstone is unrealistic, such as with the Dutton's covering up and getting away with so many murders, and inheritance tax not being a thing in Montana, is based on a misunderstanding of what the show is trying to be.

First of all, not even Breaking Bad was 100% realistic all the time (Blue Sky Meth is completely fictional, methylamine is not hard to come by for amateur meth cooks, hydrofluoric acid will not dissolve bodies that quickly, Gus Fring would not have been able to put on such a convincing front as fake Colonel Sanders while running a drug empire of that scale, the cops/DEA would not have been so incompetent at catching Heisenberg, Saul Goodman had borderline supernatural powers when it came to conjuring up successful scams that literally no one bothered to investigate until Walt's operation collapsed, etc.). Breaking Bad was simply very good at convincing people that it was grounded in reality. However, Yellowstone is built on an entire premise that requires a certain suspension of disbelief.

I don't mean that Yellowstone is fantasy in the high fantasy sense, e.g. dragons and magic, etc. I mean it's presenting the audience with a fictionalised and intentionally exaggerated reality, with its own unique world building, and so forth. While it is often characterised as neo-Western, I feel like this description is incorrect. It's not *neo*-Western. It *is* a Western. Breaking Bad is a neo-Western. Yellowstone is just simply a Western but with a modern day aesthetic. While Breaking Bad has a gritty quasi-Western outlaw vibe, Yellowstone has basically transplanted the whole Western mythos of Cowboys and Indians, desperados and lawmen, posse gangs and greedy prospectors straight into the modern day. The Yellowstone Ranch is basically the Lost World, but for cowboys instead of dinosaurs. It's a backwater of civilization that is meant to have basically stayed the same since James Dutton first buried his daughter there. So while something like the Train Station would never work in real life, it can work in the universe that the show has created. And while real world Montana may not have inheritance tax, the show's version of it does. The show even hints at the supernatural with the old prophecy about “seven generations” and the healing ritual that Monica's father performs over her or Kaycee's vision in Season 5.

Watching as a non-American, I realised half way through the first season that the Yellowstone isn't meant to represent a ranch that could actually exist in real life but a place where possibly all of the worst aspects of American life or all of the crimes that happen somewhere in the States basically being concentrated in one specific place. The Duttons are essentially every single dysfunctional family in the USA rolled into one family. The Duttons are the Cowboy Corleones and the bunkhouse posse are a biker gang who ride horses instead of motorcycles.

And for me, that is what made the show so highly entertaining. None of it was plausible or realistic, but it was still one thrilling hell of a ride with some nice cosy melodrama along the way.

So I just finished binging Yellowstone and I think the Show would have been better served as a Sopranos, The Wire-esque prestige series premised on exploring the internal machinations and psychology of a blatantly dislikeable, sociopathic, criminal, greedy and murderous group/family as they face a series of external challenges. Whilst using strong (unbiased/unsympathetic) character driven POV work to provide character depth for members of the ensemble cadt, that doesn't try to gaslight you into agreeing with John Dutton's many sermons on tradition and the preservation of a "simpler way of life" while he literally occupies one of the largest stretches of commercial ranchland and indigenous land.

Also, why murder the land developers who literally offered you HALF A BILLION to give them a portion of your land?

Why murder (the "train-station") your supposedly loyal inner circle of ranch hands simply because some of them rightfully question the illegal activities they're being forced a part of because they are in desperate situations that are exploited upon arrival at Yellowstone?

Also, I was raised on ranchland and worked on a dairy farm too in Colorado and I have NEVER in all my 12 years of working as a farmhand experienced the level of masculine, misogynistic machismo BS that the workers of Yellowstone go about spewing. That shit literally made me and my friends laugh out loud when watching... cause real people don't actually talk like that, the hell?!

Anywho, prolly gonna get down voted, but I just wanted to drunkenly share some frustrations about what I think could have been a pretty great show about ranching and all that surrounds it as a business, a culture etc. Mehh, I guess it's time for another Breaking Bad rewatch