Yellowstone flirts with big ideas about the West, but it's overwhelmed by daddy issues, land-grab intrigue and intra-family drama

The New York Times

Sicario and Hell or High Water writer Taylor Sheridan's new Paramount TV series, which he co-created with John Linson and starring Kevin Costner as wealthy cattle ranch owner John Dutton, "has a few interesting things buried within. But you need to dig through a lot of drab, hard-packed filler to get to them," says James Poniewozik. "The series seems to do that almost inadvertently, and only partially." But the Yosemite becomes yet another show revolving around a backstabbing wealthy family. "There’s nothing wrong, of course, with packaging deeper themes inside a genre story," says Poniewozik. "That was to some extent the approach of Mr. Sheridan’s film Wind River, a murder mystery set on a reservation. The Wire, likewise, delivered a five-season treatise on urban policy in the form of a police serial. But the A-story of Yellowstone is simply stale. Dutton is a hand-tooled role for Mr. Costner, but he’s not a charismatic villain in the throwback mode of Dallas, or a principled loner, or a complicated antihero. He’s just a corrupt grouch on horseback."

ALSO:

• Yellowstone's debut is reminiscent of Boardwalk Empire's pilot: Expensive to look at, painfully slow and lovingly violent
• A main problem is that Yellowstone characters are crafted primarily as symbols, rather than people
• Yellowstone gets bogged down in minutia and politics, making it as exciting as watching a zoning-commission meeting
• Yellowstone feels like a missed opportunity to do a show about wild country, instead of a family soap opera
• Kevin Costner is fairly effective and convincing as the gruff and dangerously influential Yellowstone Ranch owner