Is 'Yellowstone' ruining Montana?
It’s tough to see your hometown portrayed in television and movies. New Englanders roll their eyes at overly quaint shots of church steeples and fall foliage. Minnesotans balk at the over-the-top accents in ‘Fargo.’ And now Montanans are struggling with the way the state is portrayed in the hit television series ‘Yellowstone.’
The show stars Kevin Costner as the gravelly-voiced patriarch of the Dutton ranching family. They own a sprawling cattle operation on the edge of Yellowstone National Park and they will do whatever it takes – including a whole lot of murder – to protect their way of life from wealthy outsiders.
But in the real world, Montanans are accusing the show of attracting wealthy outsiders to move to the state and change their way of life. Since the show first aired in 2018, home prices have nearly doubled, and – anecdotally – real estate agents are leaning on Yellowstone’s appeal to sell property.
Host Nate Hegyi and Rebecca Lavoie, television critic and head of podcasts at NHPR, dive deep into how a fake show is changing a very real place and what ‘Yellowstone’ gets right, and wrong, about Native Americans, women, and the West.
Featuring: Taylar Stagner, Maggie Slepian
Bozeman, Montana. Credit: Craig Dugas (CC BY 2.0)
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LINKS
As of December 2023, Certain Women is currently streaming for free on Tubi.
You can find Taylar Stagner’s criticism on books, television and more at High Country News.
Maggie Slepian wrote an essay about the impact of ‘Yellowstone’ on her hometown of Bozeman for Outside magazine.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported and produced by Nate Hegyi
Mixed by Nate Hegyi and Taylor Quimby
Edited by Taylor Quimby
Our staff includes Justine Paradis and Felix Poon
NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio is Rebecca Lavoie
Music by Northside and Blue Dot Sessions
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
If you’ve got a question for the Outside/Inbox hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: Hey, this is outside in. I'm Nate Hegy here today with someone whose name you hear often in our credits. Rebecca Lavoie.
Rebecca Lavoie: Hello.
Nate Hegyi: Rebecca is a TV and podcast critic and a podcast host in her own right, but she’s also NHPR’s director of on-demand audio. That's your title, right on. Director of on-demand audio?
Rebecca Lavoie: I'm the head of podcasts. It's just a lot easier to say.
Nate Hegyi: Well, I wanted to use ‘On-Demand’ because I gave you a demand recently to binge-watch the show Yellowstone.
[Yellowstone trailer clip]
Nate Hegyi: Yellowstone first came out in 2018. It’s five seasons deep. Kevin Costner plays the lead, and It’s got cowboys, cattle ranches, big sweeping shots of the Rocky Mountains… And public radio audiences may be surprised to hear this, but Yellowstone was the most-watched cable TV show in 2022. So what didya think, Rebecca?
Rebecca Lavoie: I watched the whole thing. I hated it, and I watched the whole thing.
Nate Hegyi: [laughs] How would you describe it?
Rebecca Lavoie: It's Downton Abbey in Montana.
[fancy/curious mux]
Rebecca Lavoie: That's that's what it is. It's a family struggling to keep their estate, which they should not own, because times have changed. And there's an upstairs-downstairs situation. Except in Yellowstone, it's big house, little house, little house being where all the cowboys and workers live. Yeah, there's a set of siblings that are different from one another and all awful in their own separate ways. And there is problematic class and race issues going on all the time. It is Downton Abbey in America, period.
Clip: I don’t give a shit about this place… if dad died tomorrow I would sell my share to the Four Seasons. Everything I do is for him, and everything you do is for you.
Nate Hegyi: For me, actually, it reminds me of a soapy western, Game of Thrones, in part because the bad guys are all killed in, like, ridiculous ways. Like one dude is murdered after a guy throws a rattlesnake at him. Do you remember that?
Rebecca Lavoie: I sure do.
Clip: Here’s a little present from Yellowstone!
Nate Hegyi: Yep. Uh-huh. And then there's another guy who is literally shot while sitting on a toilet.
Clip: “ I don't want to die on a [bleeped] toilet.”
Clip: “I promised my wife I'd kill you. All a man has is his word. [loud gunshot sounts]
Nate Hegyi: Another thing about this show is like it is a Western, but in this western, the bad guys aren't outlaws, right? Like they're mostly real estate developers.
Rebecca Lavoie: And Easterners.
Nate Hegyi: Yes! And the main character, rancher John Dutton, played by Kevin Costner, is trying to stop them from buying his massive ranch near Yellowstone National Park.
John Dutton: Do you want to build subdivisions? Move to Dallas. I won't have them here.
Real estate developer: It’s called progress. John. Progress doesn't need your permission.
[mux here]
Nate Hegyi: The show is essentially about a family… fighting the outsiders who are moving in and trying to change their way of life.
But I ACTUALLY live in Montana.
And the Irony is, REAL Montanans are blaming this show for doing exactly that: Attracting rich outsiders who are moving in and changing their way of life.
Rebecca Lavoie: Well, it's location porn, so why wouldn't they want to do that, right? look how beautiful this is. Who wouldn't want this?
MUX SWELLS
Nate Hegyi: Seeing the place you call home depicted in a movie or a TV show can be jarring. But what happens when the Hollywood distortion starts seeping into real life?
Today on the show, we’re going to explore how a fake show is changing my home state of Montana… and we’re going to look at what yellowstone gets write and wrong about, women, native folks and the West.
[MUX FADES]
Stay tuned.
Nate Hegyi: Rebecca, were you one of those kids that wanted to leave your hometown as soon as you graduated high school?
Rebecca Lavoie: Yes, I was.
Nate Hegyi: Where'd you go?
Rebecca Lavoie: I actually came to New Hampshire.
Nate Hegyi: Okay, that tracks. But Maggie Slepian, she grew up in New Hampshire. So as soon as she graduated, she moved out West.
Maggie Slepian: it was basically, like, no offense to New Hampshire, but get me out of New Hampshire and what can I do? That is at least 2000 miles away from the town that I just spent 22 years in.
Rebecca Lavoie: Ouch.
Nate Hegyi: So Maggie has worn a lot of hats. She’s a freelance journalist. She’s also a horse wrangler for TV shows and movies. She moved to Bozeman, MT in 2012. And when she first got there, it was like every 20-something outdoorsy person's Paradise.
Maggie Slepian: I biked downtown, I worked at a local coffee shop. I dog sat it was… it just felt like a small mountain town. Community rent was.
Nate Hegyi: Rent was Not that expensive.
Maggie Slepian: We put three people into a two-bedroom apartment. It had indoor/outdoor carpeting. I'm pretty sure I paid my entire rent in cash. Tips.
Nate Hegyi: Remember when you could do that, by the way?
Rebecca Lavoie: No. [laughs] I mean, sure, I guess I mean, it sounds like she's describing sort of like the Brooklyn of the West where she's like throwing it out there, doesn't it?
Nate Hegyi: A little bit. I mean, I remember when I was able to get away with like $250 a month on, on, on rent.
Rebecca Lavoie: If you’re willing to live with three other people, it doesn't hurt.
MUX
Nate Hegyi: But then… A few years ago, around when the show began coming out… Bozeman felt like it REALLY started changing. It became a destination for rich out-of-staters. Home prices nearly doubled and anecdotally real estate agents were leaning on Yellowstone’s appeal. They referenced the show in their listings. All these ranches got subdivided. People started building McMansions.
Maggie Slepian: Things were more expensive. Small businesses are being priced out of their leases on Main Street. The local businesses and restaurants that I went to a decade ago, a lot of them are gone. They've been replaced by pop up stores. And there's these national brands. There's Athleta, there's Lululemon, there's a Backcountry.com store. Also, people can’t afford to live in Bozeman, and so there are fewer and fewer people to work in the lower paying jobs.
[mux swells and fades]
Nate Hegyi: And so this is not just a Bozeman problem, right? Like name me a beautiful rural town in America. And it's probably seen a lot of change recently from the rise of remote work of boomers retiring. I mean, have you seen this in New Hampshire?
Rebecca Lavoie: The pandemic absolutely attracted a lot of people my way. That's for sure.
Nate Hegyi: This rural gentrification, it's happening everywhere. And the attitude people have about it here in Montana, that’s one of the things I think the show gets right.
John Dutton: Well, the open bar was my daughter's idea.
Nate Hegyi: So this is from the 5th season of the show. Kevin Costner’s character, fifth generation rancher John Dutton, gets elected as Governor of the state.
He's up on a podium giving a victory speech.
John Dutton: The question we all have to answer, the one that I will look to every day, is, what will Montana look like in 100 years? Much of that is dictated by the way the world sees us today. Right now we are seen as the rich man's plaything. We are a New York's novelty in California's toy. Not anymore.
Nate Hegyi: So I think that this attitude, like, is something that people in Montana actually have. I think the show nails it. You can hear echoes of this speech, actually, in a recent campaign ad from real life Democratic Senator Jon Tester.
Jon Tester: …Things are too expensive. Some families are being forced to sell their farms they've had for generations. We're losing access to our public lands. Hell, even some of our favorite bars are closing. Folks back in Washington and even some folks moving here don't understand or frankly, don't care what's happening out here. I'm defending our way of life with everything I've got.
Nate Hegyi: Sounds kind of familiar, right?
Rebecca Lavoie: It sounds like John Dutton. Absolutely, yeah. Isn't Dutton a Republican, though, in the show? I think it's I mean, it's ambiguous, right?
Nate Hegyi: He never actually says what he is, but like, come on, dude is a Republican.
Rebecca Lavoie: Well, yes and no, because his environmental stuff is kind of all over the place. And he's rich, by the way. So when he makes fun of rich people, I'm like, dude, have you seen your house? Have you seen your house?
Nate Hegyi: Absolutely. This actually brings me to my next point. Like. The show… it kind of nails the general feeling that Montanans have towards outsiders. So you might think Yellowstone would be really popular in Montana… but it's not.
A recent poll showed that many Montanans have not watched it, and those that have do not think it reflects the state very accurately. And I think it's because the show is soapy and sexy, and the Montana it portrays is soapy and sexy too.
John Dutton: You know, when you boil life down, it's funny just how little you need, isn't it?
Beth Dutton: Shame that in a few more generations this won't exist.
John Dutton: People have been saying that for a hundred years, but I mean, they thought that barbed wire was going to ruin the frontier. Well, there it is. The frontier is all around us.
[clip fades]
Maggie Slepian: They are basically showing the highlight reel, like social media's version of what Montana looks like.
Nate Hegyi: Here's Maggie Slepian, the horse wrangler and writer.
Maggie Slepian: So you're getting kind of not only like the best conditions, but you're getting the best scenery, and you're also getting what looks like very wild spaces, which some parts of Montana do look like. But we're not shooting in wilderness because that's very difficult to get permits for. So they're shooting on these places that right outside the camera frame are developments and houses and fence lines and roads, and there's lights across the valley that are being edited out with VFX and post-production.
Nate Hegyi: And another thing in this show, winter does not exist. And let me tell you: Winters in Montana, can be pretty brutal.
Maggie Slepian: So Yellowstone shoots May through October. And unless you're you're getting B-roll from somewhere else, which they wouldn't use because it's not seasonally appropriate for the show, they're only showing it looking really nice. And sometimes the cottonwoods and aspens are changing and they're yellow and it's still really sunny. And everybody's wearing just like these very nicely fitted Carhartt style jackets. No one's dressed like a miserable snowman. And it's never -15 degrees with snow blowing sideways, and you're never walking through layers of crusty ice and punching through onto the slush and sleet below. And your horse is never getting giant snowballs stuck under their feet and, like, clogging up their shoes. Um, so it just looks a lot friendlier of an environment than it actually is.
Nate Hegyi: This would be like a movie set in New Hampshire where it's all peak foliage colors, cute white churches, kindly small towns mean like. And that is not what New Hampshire is really like, right?
Rebecca Lavoie: [laughs]
Nate Hegyi: But obviously this is like a Hollywood thing, right? Like, I think there are places that the studios love to portray beautifully, like the West or Hawaii or New York City in autumn. And then there's places that they always portray as ugly, like the Rust Belt, like nobody is moving to Pennsylvania after watching Mare of Easttown.
Rebecca Lavoie: And not just because of the accents. No.
Nate Hegyi: [00:13:32] Sorry, y'all in Pennsylvania.
[mux swells and fades]
So what’s the problem here? Well, for the millions of people watching Yellowstone on TV, they’re getting a romanticized picture of life in Montana.
And from a narrative standpoint, I think the show has to portray it in this beautiful, sexy way because:
Maggie Slepian: in order to make the audience empathize with John Dutton, they have to show Montana as a place that's worth preserving and saving. And as a result of that, you're showing this, you know, incredible landscape that people then want to move to. So it's just feels like this tangled mess.
For Maggie, it’s kind of a vicious cycle. Yellowstone depicts Montana like some kind of pioneer paradise… which leads to more people coming, more change, and more development.
Maggie Slepian: It’s hard to say what the direct cause is, but yeah seeing Montana in media playing this aspirational character, that give off this vibe that people want, has absolutely contributed to some of this migration.
[mux]
Nate Hegyi: So I should say that there is actually no hard study showing that people moved to Montana expressly because of the show. It's all anecdotal from realtors saying they get clients who bring up the show a lot. That kind of thing. But we do know that from a recent study, more than 2 million people have visited the state because of Yellowstone, the show, not the park.
And they are coming here with ideas about Montana that are based on a fictional TV show, not only about how it looks, but about the people who live here, too.
That's going to come up next. But first, I want to know, have you ever seen your hometown or your home state portrayed in a show or movie? How do they do? What do they get right? What do they get wrong? Please email us at outside.in at npr.org.
BREAK
Nate Hegyi: Hey, you're listening to Outside/In. I'm Nate Hegy here today with Rebecca Lavoie, and I feel like we've gotten a little ahead of ourselves. I'm thinking of people who haven't seen this show. Like we should give, like, a quick, like, synopsis of some of these characters. So you've got John Dutton, played by Kevin Costner, who is, you know, gruff, rough talks like this cowboy.
John Dutton: Now we face a new enemy and they don't play fair.
Nate Hegyi: And then he's got three kids.
Rebecca Lavoie: That's right. He's got Beth, his daughter, who is in, you know, a hot mess in every conceivable way. But she's also the smartest one and the most accomplished one because she's like a big financier type person.
Beth Dutton: Look at you with your cat teeth and your spray tan. Get out of my office. I don't get the fuck out of my office.
Rebecca Lavoie: You also have Jamie, who apparently got into law school because, like, John applied him to Harvard undergrad and he just got in.
Jaimie Dutton: As it stands, I am the legal authority representing the Yellowstone, and I approve the sale of that tract.
Rebecca Lavoie: And then you have Casey, the murdery cowboy who everyone says is the best, nicest one, even though he murders somebody in almost every episode in the first two seasons of the show.
Casey Dutton: There's monsters everywhere in this world. You just got to kill him when you find him.
Nate Hegyi: And as someone who does not live in the West. Rebecca, I want to know what was your take?
Rebecca Lavoie: Well, as you said, it's a soap opera. But it might also be, honestly, one of the most misogynistic soap operas I've ever watched.
Nate Hegyi: How so?
Rebecca Lavoie: Well. I mean, let's reflect on some of the women on the show, shall we? Is there a woman character on the show that you could, that you could describe as strong and admirable and not in some way completely laid low at some point, nor completely messed up, nor sleeping with one of the Duttons? Can you name any character like that?
Nate Hegyi: No.
Rebecca Lavoie: Exactly. Even the governor at the beginning of the series, Lynelle Perry, is sleeping with John Dutton. She comes the closest, probably to being a strong, empowered female character. Sleeping with John Dutton.
John Dutton: Enjoy the sunset.
Lynelle Perry: Fine, as long as you don't give me that look.
John Dutton: What look?
Lynelle Perry: That look.
MUX
Rebecca Lavoie: Later in the series, you have another romantic partner for John Dutton, Summer Higgins, played by I Can't Believe I'm Saying This, Piper Perabo from Coyote Ugly, which is like every man's fantasy of a girlfriend, right?
Nate Hegyi: I remember watching that movie when I was like a teenager, and it was….
Rebecca Lavoie: It's every man's fantasy of a girlfriend is to date, one of those women from Coyote Ugly. And, you know, Taylor Sheridan cast her as John Dutton's girlfriend. She gets laid low. She comes into town as a smart, young, bright environmentalist who, of course, is completely wrong for being a vegan.
John Dutton: Summer is a vegan. Would you make her something with no meat or eggs or milk?
Summer: Or milk.
Beth Dutton: Or Butter.
John Dutton: Or butter. Maybe some pancakes?
Summer: I don't eat gluten.
Rebecca Lavoie: …has to be beat up by Beth, sent to jail and then redeemed by learning “the cowboy way” and sleeping with John Dutton. That is the portrayal of women on Yellowstone. It's disgusting. It's completely disgusting.
Nate Hegyi: You're not a big fan of Beth Dutton, the character, right? This is John Dutton’s daughter.
Rebecca Lavoie: No, I mean, if there's a character on the show that I like, she comes the closest only because she's the only unpredictable character on the show.
Nate Hegyi: So I actually spoke with someone who also likes Beth Dutton and actually sees a grain of truth in the character. I see a.
Taylar Stagner: Lot of women who, like, are there rough and tumble. They're raised on ranches. They have they have to like, be almost better than the boys. And so like that, that dynamic I thought was pretty interesting.
Nate Hegyi: So this is Taylar Stagner. She is a freelance journalist. And if there is anyone who has lived a real-life version of Yellowstone, I think it's probably her. She grew up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming, and she says all the judgyness in the show about outsiders, it's totally real. Like there is a scene in the fifth season where Beth Dutton tries to get the ranch hands to go out on a Friday night.
Beth Dutton: Hey, why don't we go to a bar in Bozeman? That's a.
Cowboy: Terrible idea.
Beth Dutton: I think it's an excellent idea.
John Dutton: The bars in Bozeman, Beth, are full of tourists and fake cowboys.
Beth Dutton: We can go To a real cowboy bar.
John Dutton: Those don't exist anymore. Honey, listen to me. You take fake cowboys, and you put them with real cowboys in a fucking bar, and there's going to be fighting. And we don't need fighting. It's a bad idea every time.
[clip fades]
Taylar Stagner: They love to gatekeep like, who's a cowboy and who is not a cowboy.
Nate Hegyi: She says her dad and all the other ranchers, they do this all the time.
Taylar Stagner: It's like one of their favorite pastimes at like any local dive bar, it's like, well, that guy, you know, he hasn't run cattle in years. And that person, like, dipped out like it's it's something you hear a lot about.
Nate Hegyi: I'm curious, is this just a Montana thing like this judging of outsiders and posers, or is that something that people in New England do too?
Rebecca Lavoie: Oh, it is such not a Montana thing. Okay, I have lived in New Hampshire since 1993. Yeah. There are people who live in my town who still say like, oh, you're new. You just don't qualify as a local.
Nate Hegyi: You know, that was one thing that she thought that this show got right about the culture of the rural West. Another one that actually surprised me was the branding.
So, you know, like in the show, new ranch hands are branded on the chest with a big Y for Yellowstone. Dutton.
John Dutton: Are you being a man about it? Don't scream.
[Sound of heavy breathing, and then a sizzle and muffled cries as a cowboy is branded]
Taylar Stagner: Ooh. It's like, ooh, like cowboys. Kind of cool. We're going to brand each other. What is that like? That was a little weird. Not gonna lie.
Nate Hegyi: You guys never did any branding of each other at, uh, at your, uh, cattle operation?
Taylar Stagner: Oh, we had. Well, we did, but it wasn't cool. Like, it was just stupid.
RB: What??
Nate Hegyi: I was so surprised when she told me that.
Rebecca Lavoie: Oh, she just dropped that so casually. Oh, yeah, we did what?
Nate Hegyi: But like, in all seriousness, I want to be really clear here. Like, Taylor thinks there are a few things the show gets right… but it’s also super problematic.
Taylar Stagner: The United States really hasn't come to grips with its roots of colonization and Western expansion. And once you really start to dive into that, its people become uncomfortable. And that's not something that I think Yellowstone is very interested in deconstructing.
Nate Hegyi: So Taylor is a Shoshone Arapaho descendant, and she says there is a real-life tension in the West about who has rights to the land here. And sure, Yellowstone flirts with this tension in the show. There are a bunch of people vying for the Dutton ranch, and one of them is a tribal chairman, Thomas Rainwater, and he has this pretty powerful monologue in the first season.
Thomas Rainwater: I figured it'll take about 14 billion to buy it all.
John Dutton: Oh, what?
Thomas Rainwater: The valley. I'm going to buy your ranch first. Right after you die and your children can't afford the inheritance tax. And I'm going to pull down every fence. And any evidence that your family ever existed will be removed from the property. It'll look like it used to when it was ours. I will erase you from the future. And then I'll do it to the next ranch and the next. And there's nothing that you can do to stop it. See, I'm the opposite of progress, John. I am the past. Catching up with you.
[clip fades]
Taylar Stagner: If you don't depict rainwater as like a villain, he makes a really good point.
Nate Hegyi: So what is what she's referring to is the fact that indigenous communities have been on this land for tens of thousands of years, right? Like it was their homeland before they were forcibly displaced by the US government and white settlers.
Taylar Stagner: Rainwater saying that to John Dutton's face. I'm… I'm kind of on his side.
MUX
Nate Hegyi: If they're going to play a game of who has been there the longest, which they kind of do in this show. Rainwater wins. Like the tribes win.
Rebecca Lavoie: Yes. And you know how the show deals with that, which is so upsetting. They end up changing Rainwater's point of view on what he's going to do with the land when he gets it, in order to solidify the viewer against him. Right? Yes. Season one, he's going to tear down all the fences and make it the past by season four, season five, he's going to be building an airport and a town and casinos and partnering with these gigantic financial developers. That's what they do to try to manipulate the story, to try to get us team Dutton. And again, it's it's real gross. With the end of doing with this character, it's real gross.
Taylar Stagnar: I do find interesting, in the ways it depicts John Dutton as an anti-hero. He just very confidently asserting his domination over this land, it’s his, it’s his family’s, he’ll kill for it to defend it. I mean, I understand why people are attracted to it. [pause] I’m not one of them.
MUX FADE UP AND OUT
Nate Hegyi: There’s another example of how the show does a ham-fisted job dealing with Indigenous issues. So in one episode, there is this whole plot line where Kayce Dutton, who again, is that grungy youngest, Dutton, he's driving with his son down a highway on the Broken Rock reservation, and he spots this sketchy-looking van parked off the side of the road. So he pulls over.
Kayce Dutton: There's laws on the reservation that don't apply to people who don't live here. Sometimes people come and try to take advantage.
Nate Hegyi: So Casey walks out and sure enough, he finds a kidnapped indigenous teenager in the van along with two white guys who he, because this is Yellowstone, shoots and kills. And then he takes the girl home and he tells her dad what happened.
Father: One thing about the rez. That's where things go to disappear.
Nate Hegyi: Then the dad and Casey, they go back out there, they put the bodies in a hole. They light them on fire. End of story. And what this scene is referring to is the very real missing and murdered indigenous peoples crisis. Are you familiar with that, Rebecca?
Rebecca Lavoie: I absolutely am familiar with it. And you're actually, like, missing, you're missing one detail that is also part of this same story. It happens contemporaneously to this story, which is supposed to heighten the tension but also detracts from the issue at hand, which is that while Casey is having this confrontation with these two men, that leads to him killing them, his son Tate crawls into a pipe with a rattlesnake in it. Right? It's silly obviously, dramatically, but it's also like… keep your eye on the ball. If you're going to do this story, do it right, do it well and not fail at it in every possible way, which is what they did with it.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, exactly. It kind of just glazes over this very real issue, which just in case people who aren't familiar with this crisis, native folks, they go missing or are murdered at a much higher rate than other demographics in this country. And the show treats it like a momentary side plot.
Taylar Stagner: It loses those... That moment that could have been very pointed like this is due to lack of funding. This is due to a large areas with very few police to take care of people. it's a lot of things. So it's one of those… It could have been, it didn't even have to take that long. It could have been just like, hey, why is this person being kidnapped by two white guys in a van? And why do we feel so comfortable just kind of like, okay, well, that was just for drama's sake when there could have been some teaching there.
Nate Hegyi: And this is where I feel like the creators of the show do a legit disservice to their audience.
Taylor Sheridan, who wrote most of the episodes, he never really criticizes or examines the ugly roots of the West, like how the US government maintains a broken system of funding that exacerbates poverty and death on reservations… or how wealth disparity has created a situation where rich East coasters can just buy up millions of acres of ranch land in the West just to go hunting a couple times a year.
there is a real impact in a show not going deep or playing this kind of stuff out for drama because, you know, a lot of Americans aren't reading history books. They're understanding of the West of native people. It comes from Hollywood, right?
Taylar Stagner: Reality is so much more mundane. And in that way it's a lot more evil and it's a lot more insidious and it's a lot more. It's… The reality is a lot more sad than a lot less exciting, and a lot less like something Taylor Sheridan might be interested in depicting.
Nate Hegyi: I want to end this on a little bit of an uplifting note, and I want to assign another movie to you or anybody else. Consider it an ANTI-dote to Yellowstone. Anecdote? Antidote? How do you say that word?
Rebecca Lavoie: Antidote. Anecdote is a story, Nate.
Nate Hegyi: Antidote to Yellowstone. It's a movie called Certain Women. Have you ever seen it? No. It's came out in 2016, directed by Kelly Reichardt. It's a really small indie film. It's got Lily Gladstone in it of killers of the Flower Moon fame, but I think it nails what Montana is actually like. All the drama is small. The backdrop. The backdrop is February, so melting snow, bare trees, crappy strip malls, all that. Though I will say I had a friend who actually didn't like the movie because they were like like after they watched it, they were like, why would I go to a movie that literally just reminds me of real life and is depressing and gross outside.
Rebecca Lavoie: You saying this is a good movie? But I'm not going to, like, be taken to shopping sites afterwards and want to buy a robe?
Nate Hegyi: I promise you, you are not going to be going in and like trying to buy. I think Kristen Kristen Stewart's in it She's rocking a turtleneck. She looks very comfortable, but like it's not exactly one that you're going to go out and like try, try and purchase that turtleneck.
Rebecca Lavoie: That's probably for the best.
Nate Hegyi: This episode was reported and produced by me Nate Hegy with help from Rebecca Lavoie, who is also our executive producer. It was edited by Taylor Quimby. Our team includes Felix Poon and Justine Paradise. Music in this episode came from Northside, and Blue Dot sessions. Our theme music is by Brake Master Cylinder. Outside is a production of NHPR.