It has been heralded as “America’s greatest show” and was the most popular scripted show in the country last year, but Yellowstone could easily have fallen under your radar. It took years for the series to reach our side of the pond, but once it did – on Paramount+ and My5 – it didn't take long for UK viewers to become just as obsessed.
Not to be confused with Yellowjackets (the series about the high school football team who crash land in the wilderness) Yellowstone is a “neo-Western drama” following the present day lives of the Dutton family, owners of the largest ranch in Montana, called the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch, which borders the Broken Rock Indian Reservation and a national park.
The sleeper series, which launched in 2018 and features Kevin Costner as the patriarch John Dutton II, is high drama, with stunning backdrops of the mountains of Montana, and has been described as “Succession meets Dallas”. The fifth season of the show launches this month, alongside new details of spin-off prequel series called 1923, covering the same family 100 years earlier, starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren.
What’s the big idea?
1923 is set a century before Kevin Costner’s John Dutton III, and, according to its synopsis: “a new generation of the Dutton family will explore the early twentieth century when pandemics, historic drought, the end of Prohibition, and the Great Depression all plague the mountain west, and the Duttons who call it home.”
The series is a second prequel in the Yellowstone universe – 40 years on from 1882, featuring Tim McGraw and Faith Hill as the original Duttons – and Ford and Mirren star as Jacob and Cara Dutton.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Ford said: “Jacob’s the silverback. He’s responsible for that branch of the family. These are two people with a very strong bond to each other who are facing really complicated circumstances.”
Mirren said that she helped build the character of Cara with a full history behind her, and revealed the reason why she has an Irish accent: “I see Cara as an immigrant. One of the things I very strongly wanted was that she would speak with an Irish accent, not with an American accent. It’s always slightly annoyed me with Westerns that you have all these people speaking with modern American accents when in fact so many of them were fairly recent immigrants.”
She added: “The big Irish immigration to America, because of the potato famine, was in the late 19th century. That absolutely chronologically works for Cara. She’s now in her late 60s, we imagine. So she would’ve come, I think, as a young woman from Ireland. I think that’s one of the extraordinary elements of America. The people who arrived, and are still arriving, are people with enormous resilience and enormous courage and independence.”
As per the other series, Native American storylines will play an important part in the show, with one storyline this season focusing on the true-life scandal of indigenous women forced to attend government-run boarding schools, taken away from their families and made to give up their cultural practices and languages.
The Duttons will also clash with the “sheep men”: rival ranchers who work on the same grasslands, led by Game of Thrones’ Jerome Flynn.
Interestingly, it's a reunion of sorts for Ford and Mirren, who previously played a couple who move to the jungle in 1986’s The Mosquito Coast, alongside the late River Phoenix.
1923 airs on Paramount+ from December 18.
