NOT THE PONDEROSA
Over the last few years I was aware of a series called Yellowstone that was very popular but I figured I'd just wait to see it after it was picked up on YouTube. Last week a friend of mine urged me to make an effort to find it. I discovered that I could see the first episode "Daybreak" on my laptop for free on a site called "Peacock". I settled in, turned it on and before 15 seconds had gone by, watched Kevin Costner use one hand to grab a horse by its ear and with his other hand, place a pistol under its jawbone and blow its brains out. One assumes the horse needed to be put down as the scene took place on a highway with the horse sticking its head out of one of the handful of vehicles scattered topsy-turvy up and down the road. Although one can't be sure as no mention of the incident was ever provided - unless perhaps details were revealed during the fast-forwarding approach I soon began to rely on.
Costner plays the owner of the largest ranch in Montana and a widower with several mildly disturbed sons and a sociopathic daughter. He insists on preserving the natural order of the wilderness, vows to fight off all those that would intrude on his domain and prowls the prairie spouting homespun wisdom with the sanctimonious persona he brings to most films, along with the emotional range of an inflatable mattress.
Within seconds of shooting the horse, Costner and one of his sons are yanking a breech-birth calf out of its mother while another son (this one estranged) is breaking a stallion in what appears to be less than a morning. The episode suddenly shifts to a conference room where Costner's daughter inexplicably relishes the takeover of a local oil company and the humiliation of the former owner before traveling to the family ranch to induce one of the help to ravish her while perched atop a chest of drawers. These two scenes with the daughter are among the very few that do not involve a helicopter.
Meanwhile Costner is made aware by yet another son (lawyer) that a local developer has launched an upscale community adjacent to Costner's property whose signature feature is the river that runs through both properties. Costner's concern for the natural order does not deter him from diverting the course of the river to bypass the planned community, wiping out several miles of a healthy ecosystem. This comes as a shock to the developer who curiously failed to comprehend that his planned community was downstream from Costner's property.
Intermixed with the developer subplot is a rapid flurry of scenes as follows:
1. Costner attends a livestock auction the day after the highway incident where he put down the horse, but the gash on his forehead from the incident has now disappeared. While at the auction he chats with the governor of Montana and it becomes obvious that they are an item.
2. A herd of buffaloes is transported to the ranch and unloaded in front of a befuddled group of ranch hands.
3. The newly installed chief of the Crow reservation that borders Costner's property plots a ruse that will gain him support but take cattle from Costner. Oddly, the chief in a rant about evil white men refers to himself as "Indian".
4. We find that Costner's estranged son lives on the reservation with his crow wife and half-breed son.
5. The father of an excon arranges with Costner for his boy to be taken on at the ranch as a means of turning his life around. One of Costner's ranch hands confronts the young excon in his trailer, turns a cattle branding iron white hot over a gas stove burner and sears a gigantic "Y" onto the kid's chest. As the episode unfolds, the branding of family members and ranch hands is evidently common practice.
6. Costner asks his estranged son to let him get to know his grandson (the half breed). This results in a fishing outing where Costner, his grandson and two of Costner's sons fish mounted on horseback in the middle of a river (one assumes the same river whose path was altered but this goes unmentioned). Evidently the producers chose fishing on horseback instead of from the helicopter. One of Costner's sons cast out, gets a bite and hands the rod to the grandson telling him to reel it in. The grandson cranks the reel twice and the estranged son scoops up the fish out of the water and they all celebrate the grandson's catch despite his having virtually no part in it.
7. Costner, in the helicopter of course, leads a platoon of ranch hands riding ATVs armed with automatic weapons in the pitch-black of the Montana prairie night, on a raid of the crow reservation to retrieve the cattle taken from them. During the raid, a firefight ensues between the ranch hands and crow tribesmen where the estranged son's wife's brother kills one of Costner's sons and in turn is done away with by the estranged son.
8. Costner's estranged son returns to his home on the reservation and is pressed by his wife for details as to what took place the previous night. Since no one saw what happened in the dark, and there apparently is no law enforcement agency in the state of Montana, he decides she doesn't need to hear about it.
I called it quits when the funeral scene opened. Has there ever been a dramatic film recently that didn't have a funeral, a nazi, or characters in a men's room with at least one of them in front of a urinal?
I think it was the branding scene when I first began to realize what I was seeing. In hindsight, it is rather obvious that the show is a collection of bits that Mel Brooks discarded from Blazing Saddles as being too ridiculous to be funny.