Bloody beef
The spectacular, structureless violence of 'Yellowstone,' America's most-watched cable series
Thirty minutes into the first episode of Yellowstone, Kevin Costner’s John Dutton, in the middle of a tense conversation with his estranged son Kayce, played by Luke Grimes, pauses to scowl at something in the distance. “Even here,” he says, on the remote Indian reservation where Kayce lives, “the world just keeps on coming.” We cut to a wide shot and see what he’s talking about: Fracking rigs, a half dozen of them, towering above the sagebrush hills along a dirt road leading to the reservation, each one nearer than the last, a slow-motion industrial invasion. It’s already the second such scene we’ve seen, in fact; pointedly, the very first of the show’s many sweeping aerial shots of the majestic Montana landscape pushes in on another row of CGI drilling towers stretching across a valley floor.
This might be skillful visual storytelling, but anyone who’s lived near an oil patch could tell you…