Yellowstone has certainly struck a chord with conservatives and people tired of woke TV, despite its creator insisting it’s not a red-state show. Before Yellowstone premiered and became a massive hit, in theory, its plot wouldn’t have necessarily seemed like a winner back then. There’s a simple reason for that. Most popular TV shows, no matter how controversial their subject-matter is, generally tend to avoid political overtones unless they only appeal to liberals.
There are a few notable exceptions s,uch as Netflix’s The Ranch, which was one of the most overwhelmingly conservative-leaning sitcoms in recent memory. Despite only having a 66% rating score on Rotten Tomatoes, the show was one of the top 10 most popular Netflix series at one point (and died a brutal death due to Danny Masterson’s assault charges).
This does show that despite the overwhelming liberal bias in most TV shows, audiences may not necessarily always share the same feelings. As a kind of litmus test, one need only look at the success and popularity of Yellowstone, despite its clear lean toward conservative values over woke culture.
A Breath of Fresh Air
It doesn’t really matter what your political beliefs may be. Good TV has a way of bridging divides and ratings always end up mattering more than individual opinions.When Yellowstone first began, it was soon evident that the show had some pretty strong conservative leanings. While there are many strong characters and performances, one often sticks out in the minds of most fans. Through Kevin Costner’s strong performance and screen presence as the head of the infamous Dutton Family, the show is unapologetically authentic in many ways.
In one of the first season’s most popular scenes, Costner’s character John Dutton III comes across a group of Asian tourists on his land and chases them away in a very conservative way — with a gun as he indirectly espouses an affinity for capitalism over notions of collective land ownership. Aside from this, the show revolves around a family that owns a massive ranching empire in Montana, which is traditionally considered a red state.
Despite all this, when we mention the show being ‘authentic’, this isn’t only in terms of character depictions and themes. So-called woke TV certainly has its fans (why else would there be so much of it?). However, since wokeness often finds an enforcement wing through cancel culture, the two are usually intertwined. As a result, woke TV can often come across as forced or contrived (the recent series Velma is a prime example of this). This may be a speculative opinion, but the likely reason for this is that woke shows often only throw in woke elements to ensure that no aspects of these shows can be considered controversial or unwittingly end up in the cross-hairs of cancel culture.
In contrast, Yellowstone doesn’t play this game and presents its characters and themes in an authentic way. In a way, the show is simple; they are who and what they are, and you can either like them or not. If ratings and acclaim are anything to go on, though, it seems audiences like them very much, so it seems its authenticity has obviously struck a chord with viewers.
Is Yellowstone a ‘Red Show?’
Yellowstone has certainly been embraced and cheered in conservative circles. The show is often revered as an antidote to other ordinary and mundane shows that take the safe way out through wokeness due to an apparent fear of upsetting or offending any potential viewers. Given its setting, and the inclinations of its main characters and themes, there certainly is a case to be made for why people believe it is a so-called ‘red show’.
However, the show’s creator himself Taylor Sheridan has publicly disavowed such claims and even suggested that the notion of Yellowstone being a ‘red show’ is actually laughable. He backs this up by pointing toward other prevalent themes and character traits that seemingly reject mainstream conservative values, or at least stray from them.
It seems that people are still going to make their own minds up no matter how much evidence exists one way or the other. Again, rather than this being a problem for the show, it’s arguably one of its strengths. If anything, the duality present between the show’s conservative elements, and those that don’t espouse them, create a kind of middle ground that ends up providing appeal on both ends of the spectrum.
Does it Really Matter?
One way of looking at it is that the flawed nature of the characters who stray from traditional conservatism are simply a fair representation of human nature. After all, despite how polarized the political spectrum may seem at times, there are still many people out there who may retain more nuanced opinions that never seem to fit neatly on either end.
Yellowstone may continue to be cheered as a conservative favorite but its longevity, ratings, and awards suggest that it also has a wider audience and fan base. Rather than constantly trying to box the show into a classification of ‘ours’ instead of ‘theirs,’ perhaps we should just put aside all this conjecture and just enjoy it for what it truly is — a great show no matter which way you look at it.