Streaming Yellowstone

[Red mist]

Hi,
I burned through the first 2 seasons of Yellowstone about a year ago.
created and written by Tyler Sheridan who wrote Sicario, Hell or High water, and wrote and directed Wind River. This dudes a Rancher at heart. This is what Cowboys are today.
They have power. And I guess they are also getting squeezed by the outside world.
So that power feels fragile. The fences are the people going at their land more than literally.
Set in Wyoming I think or Montana, it’s pastureland at the foot of the Rockies.
It’s a good show that shows how running a farm can be as ruthless as running a tech company and the story is compelling as the family is reasonably torn.
Oh yeah it got Kevin Costner but he’s probably overtaken by his supporting cast.
If you don’t like cowboy shows you might still get drawn on the politics.
It’s tight.

 

[BEaston]

It's a great show, looking forward to getting stuck into the new season.

 

[AFDogs]

It's on my watch list good to hear it's a good show.

Will likely give it a crack after Killing Eve and Power.

 

[Colonial]

Really good show.

 

[Red Black and Blue]

Good show, but leans too dramatic too often. Inorganically. A little soap opera like.

 

[Red mist]

Inorganic... like really? It’s set in the country. Rocky Mountain country. There’s not much soap opera about it either.
It’s pretty gritty to be honest and the relationships between characters are well developed unlike soap operas.
ok thanks for your take though.

 

[Red Black and Blue]

Inorganic... like really? It’s set in the country. Rocky Mountain country. There’s not much soap opera about it either.
It’s pretty gritty to be honest and the relationships between characters are well developed unlike soap operas.
ok thanks for your take though.

Kayce kills 4 people in 3 different unrelated cases in the space of two days before his wife gets put into a coma the next one before one of her friends kills herself the day after. That is soap opera level contrivance.

 

[Red mist]

Kayce kills 4 people in 3 different unrelated cases in the space of two days before his wife gets put into a coma the next one before one of her friends kills herself the day after. That is soap opera level contrivance.

Why isn’t it just the nature of his story arc.
How does contrivance as a word instill itself in the story. The writers aren’t putting that in.

 

[Red Black and Blue]

Why isn’t it just the nature of his story arc.
How does contrivance as a word instill itself in the story. The writers aren’t putting that in.

Yeah it’s his arc, a poor one that has a soap opera amount of drama... It’s completely immersion destroying unless you don’t expect a minimum standard of plausibility.

 

[Red mist]

Yeah it’s his arc, a poor one that has a soap opera amount of drama... It’s completely immersion destroying unless you don’t expect a minimum standard of plausibility.

Plausibility. Should we go through the four kills ?

 

[Red Black and Blue]

Plausibility. Should we go through the four kills ?

Only the first one is story based and natural part of his story. The others he drives by. Before his wife gets put into a coma by a 15 year old one punch and then the police are happy to overlook both of them. Ridiculous.

That’s three seasons worth of coincidences for his character not a weekend.

 

[Red mist]

Only the first one is story based and natural part of his story. The others he drives by. Before his wife gets put into a coma by a 15 year old one punch and then the police are happy to overlook both of them. Ridiculous.

That’s three seasons worth of coincidences for his character not a weekend.

Ok but weren’t they deputised with the old man the stock sheriff and then he quit at the start of season 3.

 

[Gasometer]

Slowly inching our way through S2 Ep 6 and all I will say is boy that escalated quickly

 

[Monocle]

Watched every episode thats been released ............... engaging and captivating viewing.

Those guys that haven't seen the season end to Series Two ............ hold on to your seats the action comes thick and fast.

Season three hasn't disappointed either.
Season three answers a lot of the questions that were left hanging in the first two seasons as the plot gets a whole lot thicker.

 

[Colonial]

Yep season 3 is great so far.

 

[Gasometer]

So just finished Season 2 and whilst it ramped up I felt like I was watching Sons of Horses (Anarchy)

 

[Willo_]

Just watched the season 3 finale....

I have so much to discuss.

Bloody enjoyable show, cliffhangers galore this finale and now to wait till June next year for answers.

 

[Colonial]

Just watched the season 3 finale....

I have so much to discuss.

Bloody enjoyable show, cliffhangers galore this finale and now to wait till June next year for answers.

Going to be a long 10 months. Hell of an ending.

 

[Cattery]

Just finished season one (yeah I'm a bit behind) and though it's a quality show the one big turn off is the characters, practically every single one of them is so reprehensible you couldn't give a damn what happens to them.

Need some balance in a series, some characters you can root for instead of just an endless parade of scumbags.

 

[two blue tiger]

Top show. Really enjoyed it.

 

[Sweet Jesus]

Kayce kills 4 people in 3 different unrelated cases in the space of two days before his wife gets put into a coma the next one before one of her friends kills herself the day after. That is soap opera level contrivance.

Exactly. This show is ridiculously melodramatic.

Rip watches two people fall to their death and then immediately gets attacked by a bear. The next day he has to save a policewoman who's been impaled on a fence post. What an eventful couple of days.

I also have trouble accepting this idea that a bunch of farm workers are actually a private militia/hit squad.

Kayce kills someone in each of the first three episodes, all unrelated. Are we meant to believe that he just drives around and randomly encounters situations that require him to kill someone? Pure coincidence? Is this just standard?

They also kidnapped Danny Huston, who is a multimillionaire, and pretended to lynch him and there were no consequences?

Also the hot native American teacher, who is 26 years old, just moves seamlessly from teaching middle school to becoming a history professor? I don't think that's how it works.

It wants to be taken so seriously, like it's Breaking Bad or something similar in tone, but it's so ridiculously over-the-top that it veers into farce.

 

[Sweet Jesus]

This show is all over the shop. I'm halfway through season 2 and the characters are so inconsistently drawn and the plot is totally implausible, even by TV standards.

The best performance, IMO, is Cole Hauser as Rip Wheeler but even his character I find to be written quite inconsistently. This is an implausible character, sold hard. How many episodes between Rip and Kayce hating each other to Rip going out of his way to look after Kayce's kid? What happened? They hated each other all their lives but they had a fight and now they're mates? This kind of whiplash is bad writing.

I think the show asks too much of the audience by insisting this ranch is staffed by cattle handlers who are also essentially hitmen. That's an outrageous ask. Someone wants to leave so they're prepared to kill them? Give me a spell. These guys work on a farm - it's not the mafia. It's never really explained how such an extreme set of circumstances makes sense.

The whole introduction of "the Beck brothers" is also badly handled. Why are these guys such a big deal? They both seem like lightweights so why are they equipped for violence that would test the Yellowstone militia? What makes them so formidable that it requires a treaty to confront them? None of it seems designed to make sense. This guy, Neal McDonough, played almost the exact same character on Justified, the dangerous gangster who makes erudite speeches while staring out the window and that's meant to be menacing. This is bullshit. Gustavo Fring is a worthy villain. This guy is a cliche. Honestly, The Walking Dead is better written than this trash. Taking on these guys was the stakes for the whole second series and it was nothing.

But after it all escalates, they've still got the family lawyer feeding the cows to teach him a lesson? This is ridiculous. All the characters make absurd decisions that are totally at odds with how their motivations have been drawn and the world we're asked to accept.

It's like they want all the stakes of a show about organised crime where the audience accepts that people will get killed (The Sopranos, Ray Donovan, Ozark, Breaking Bad) but want to have a show about cowboys with beautiful landscape shots. So they just say "yeah whatever, these cowboys are also hitmen, like a private militia". Why? I mean, if you had a show about deep sea fishermen and half of them were killers, wouldn't that be a bit weird?

Apparently someone has to be murdered every episode for there to be stakes? Is this NCIS: Montana?

The overall serious tone of Yellowstone, with all the deep speechifying, is completely undermined by the ridiculous story elements. They would have been better off leaning in to the more wry, nudge-nudge elements of something like Justified. Or they should have made Rip Wheeler the main character and turned it into Ray Donovan: Montana.

 

[Sweet Jesus]

Inorganic... like really? It’s set in the country. Rocky Mountain country.

It's set in the country so the drama and the tension can't be inorganic?

It’s pretty gritty to be honest and the relationships between characters are well developed unlike soap operas.

There's a veneer of grittiness that's unearned and superficial. And the relationships between the characters are by no means well-developed. Things are simply reset and repeated ad nauseum.

One of the central dramatic premises of the first season with Kayce/John is that Kayce despises his father and doesn't want to be anything like him. That is the starting point for the relationship between these characters. But by the early episodes of the second season, that's been thrown out the window and Kayce is living on the ranch, learning from his father how to run it. I thought he hated everything about the place? How do you accept that turnaround and claim it's well-developed? His wife left him so all his resentment towards his father evaporates?

This is bad writing.

And everything to do with Kayce's hot native American wife is ridiculous. The material is nonsensical and she has one earnest expression of disapproval that gets rolled out for every situation. She's very attractive but her performance from what I've seen is awful, even in a character that is desperately under-written. She leaves Kayce because she can't abide his family but she turns around and comes to live on the ranch as well? What happened to her hostility towards John Dutton and her commitment to the res? The land was stolen from her people and she became a history professor teaching all about it. Now she's cool and living on the ranch, taking a bath in their mansion? And her whole objection to the Duttons is they have a violent way of life and she doesn't want any part of that. But then Beth shows up for breakfast with her face bashed in and it causes barely a ripple. This is insane. These convenient turnarounds just paper over the cracks of bad writing.

And can someone explain to me why Beth and Jamie hate each other that much? She's crazy and he's soft. That's very broadly drawn. And that doesn't really explain why she apparently prefers him dead than alive. Yeah, their mum dies in terrible circumstances. And that explains why Beth hates her brother? This makes no sense. It's completely OTT. And from what I can see, Jamie is a pointless character so far. There is no plot function at all.

Again, this is all unearned drama. They want the audience to buy into this whole frame of a dysfunctional rich family with problems but they don't really do the job of explaining why they're so dysfunctional or why we should care.

Let me guess. They'll get attacked in a way that brings them all together. This is so dumb and overwrought.

 

[Sweet Jesus]

Kevin Costner made his name as a director with Dances with Wolves.

They should call this Succession with Horses. And that flatters it.

Beautiful cinematography. And I enjoy the soundtrack, the "creator" Taylor Sheridan is a fan of Chris Stapleton. But the characters and the story are absurd.

Where are John Dutton's other advisers? He's this big-time rancher but his only advisers are his three unhinged 30-something children? This is absurd. Where is his consigliere who's been around for 30 years? No one with the kind of wealth and power attributed to John Dutton in this show is relying on his three 30-something children to get him through various crises.

This is expensively produced trash. The world-building is broken. The rules established by the show don't square with reality.

 

[Sweet Jesus]

And the morality play with the "shoplifting" scene.

OMG they took Kevin Costner's grandson, so now he can go all Liam Neeson and everyone can cheer it on because family. How unoriginal can we get? We sat through 18 hours for this redemption arc until old man Kevin Costner tears the world apart to save his grandson.

The pretty lass who plays Monica can't act to save herself. Someone kidnaps her son and she can't get it out of second gear.

And then we have a flashback that relies on Kevin Costner having a moustache making him younger. That was a fine scene, though, with his old man and Chris Stapleton playing in the background. The old fella really sold it.

Even so, this is awful, self-important rubbish. And it's so unoriginal in the story development and the beats.

Danny Huston plays an effete millionaire for two seasons but somehow manages to kill two hardcore special forces guys at the end. His character has no arc whatsoever. A complete waste of a fine actor.

And at the end of season two, the native Americans join forces with Kevin Costner and his mates to fight some third force that's never explained. So many great moments of cooperation between them. They even draw little chalk native American runes on the Yellowstone horses so I guess they're all friends now. The native Americans and the rich white landowners are the good guys but the crazy suicidal RW militia, we can all agree they're bad!

This is the dumbest "prestige" TV I've ever seen.