Tag: Taylor Sheridan

Why Even Try: That was the message behind the ending of the ‘Yellowstone’ television show

I wanted to like Yellowstone, but I am so sick of all these dumb Indian stories where they are portrayed as some superior but victimized race of people who had their land stolen from them.  That whole line of dialogue was signaled from the beginning of the five seasons of Yellowstone, the popular television show that has been streaming for a while now.  But Taylor Sheridan, the writer, and director of the show, as well as the producer, did some experiments that pulled the show in a direction that looked to be a love letter to the MAGA movement at times, and I thought it was pretty good after I finally sat down this year and caught up to the whole thing.  It’s a story of the value of land ownership standing up to those who want to take it in the realm of big business, making it a classic Western story.  And it had its moments.  But the way it ended predictably fell back to the ridiculous Indian narrative, and after all that fighting, the show ended with part two of season 5 with John Dutton, played by Kevin Costner, dying at the hands of his jealous, adopted son, and the family giving the land back to the Indians.  And those same Indians went to the family cemetery and knocked over all the tombstones as if to erase that the Duttons were ever there.  This is significant because a series of spin-off shows have led to this main show of Yellowstone, which tells the story of many generations of the Dutton family fighting for their land, only to have it all gone in such an unspectacular way.  The show’s central theme then was not about property rights but about reconciling a loss that the Indians experienced because the Duttons moved there in the first place.

The truth is, and we are about to see this worldwide under the next Trump administration, the world wants to be protected by American ideas.  And that was what winning the West was all about in the first place.  The Indians were a global culture of backward-thinking nomads who were anti-civilization.  And some of them, at the time that Columbus arrived in the New World, wanted very much to be a part of that American experience.  And that was certainly the case in all these Taylor Sheridan stories about settling the Dutton family in the Yellowstone area.  The Indians weren’t evil, but they weren’t doing much to help themselves until Western civilization came along.  Reservation life might have come across as unfair, but so is a harsh winter with no shelter.  It all comes down to perspective, and for political motivations, we tend to romanticize the Indian lifestyle in unrealistic ways.  And that is certainly the problem with Hollywood writers who discover late in life the lavish lifestyle of Western life once they can afford to buy ranches of their own and get into the cowboy life a bit.  Taylor Sheridan certainly fell in love with Western life.  But coming from a Hollywood perspective, and this is obvious when you visit places like Jackson, Wyoming, where many celebrities leave Hollywood and set up homes in that area, the messages often get mixed.  And they try to bring their Hollywood liberalism to the rough and tumble Western lifestyle, and those two things usually don’t go together, which was the case with the entire Yellowstone television series.  Do you want to make a show that people want to watch, or do you want to make a political statement that changes from season to season?  And unfortunately for Yellowstone, it ultimately came down to a political statement about Indians and how we took their land from them unfairly. 

The indigenous people’s argument goes back to the invasion of Canaan by the Hebrews and persists to this day, and it’s the way that global socialists argue against their capitalist rivals.  And in America, the socialist movement latched on to the Indians and made them into an argument that America should have never been formed.  Under this next Trump term, we’re going to find out that many places in the world want to join the American idea because it’s good for them.  And it was good for the Indians, too.  But as we know from history, they weren’t the first to settle in America.  There was already an empire of very tall people who were part of a global pyramid-building culture that predated the Maya and Aztecs to the south, down into Mexico.  Off the coast of Cuba, under a lot of water, are buried cities that predate the Indians of the plains by many thousands of years.  I would say that the Indians are part of a failed culture that had its light put out long before the arrival of Columbus or the start of America as a nation and a set of ideas that freed the individual from the clutches of collectivism.  And the Indians were collectivists, which is why modern Marxists like them. However, from a historical perspective, they were a failed people from a society that tried but failed to emerge to build their own version of the city-state, leaving them mostly at war with each other when Columbus arrived.  Actors like Taylor Sheridan and Kevin Costner want to believe that, like the Chinese, the people from India and all over the East have superior knowledge about how to live with nature instead of imposing human will over it and that the key to happiness is just preposterous.  And every Western these days, because Hollywood has so many broken people, Westerns are made with that perspective, which gets irritating. 

And Yellowstone as a show just wasn’t very good without Kevin Costner.  They killed him off in the first episode of the second half of the season, and from there, the show just tanked.  Taylor Sheridan got too big for his pants and thought he didn’t need Costner.  So, the two parted ways over creative disagreements.  Costner was going through a divorce and wanted to make his own western series for the movies. A lot went wrong in everyone’s lives, and it showed in the show.  But Taylor Sheridan didn’t help himself by throwing gas on the fire with Costner, and instead of working with him to finish the show, he just killed him off, thinking the rest of the cast could carry the show.  Which they couldn’t.  And left to finish the show without Costner, they retreated to the Indian subplot and made that the moral of the unsatisfying story.  And it turned out to be garbage, not worth watching.  And that’s how Yellowstone ended in a political climate where the world is seriously thinking of becoming states of America, such as in Canada, Greenland, and Mexico.  After all, a country is just a set of ideas, and many places in the world want to have the same ideas as America because it’s good for them.  And it was good for the Indians, too.   What was bad for the Indians was a socialist political movement that wanted to exploit them to undo America’s creation as a capitalist country.  And at the end of Yellowstone, which started as a quest for land and capital, the dream of a family was broken and sent back to the heathens, the failures of world populations and society as if to say that none of it was worth while in the end.  So why even try? 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

A Love Letter to America: Season 5 of ‘Yellowstone’

Now that I have watched the Yellowstone series it has confirmed something that I had suspected, which made it a more urgent project.  There is a lot more going on with it than just an entertaining television show.  Taylor Sheridan and the gang are making a point and they know who their audience is, which was obvious at the start of Season 5 if you know what you are looking for.  Of course, Yellowstone is the popular television show for Paramount Plus, which many have called a love letter to the MAGA political movement.  Over the various seasons, Sheridan and the gang obviously struggled with this impression.  After all, they are Hollywood lefties and they didn’t want to be viewed by their peers as a bunch of radical right-winged lunatics.  However, the show has become increasingly popular over the five seasons because the topic of a modern Western has captured the hearts and minds of an audience hungry for content that represents their concerns.  Taylor Sheridan has become a scorching commodity since all the shows he’s producing suddenly are doing very well, not just with Yellowstone, but also the spin-off shows like 1883, 1923, and Bass Reeves.  There are more in the works, but these are all excellent shows, and in my wildest dreams, I never thought I’d see them on television.  They remind me of the old westerns I grew up with, like Gunsmoke and Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie, and I didn’t think Hollywood could produce anything like that ever again.  However, with Taylor Sheridan and Kevin Costner, along with others, there is a revolt against Hollywood that has been going on in Montana and Texas, which has its own kinetic energy that is giving voice to America, which is crying out for its own existence. 

If you’ve ever dealt with Hollywood types you will know that they are cosmetically, outright Marxists.  But around the catering truck, they are like everyone else.  They are mostly Marxists because they have to be to get work, and the financiers of their projects want global communism; otherwise, their projects don’t get greenlit.  But on rare occasions, sometimes you can flip the script on that process, and when someone like Taylor Sheridan is successful, the greed factor takes over, and the finance people forget about Marxism and turn to the glitter and glory of massive profit, which is one of the great attributes of capitalism.  Yellowstone is not a show that could have been made for state-run television.  It is a love letter to the foundation of America, and it is oozing in patriotism.  With the success that Taylor Sheridan has found with these projects, he is moving in a more obvious direction politically, which is similar to what we’ve seen with Elon Musk, President Trump, and Joe Rogan, all people who voted Democrat but have changed over time, based on what they have seen.  At the beginning of Season 5, when John Dutton becomes governor of Montana to essentially save his ranch from developers who want to build an airport, during the swearing-in scene, there is a long pause before putting his hand on the Bible, where Kevin Costner is throwing obvious red meat to the Hollywood community.  The purpose of the scene was to show that the Yellowstone production had not gone native and thrown their lot in with God, even though Kevin Costner does end up doing so and swearing to protect the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic.  But the scene’s purpose, even if Taylor Sheridan will never admit to it, was to throw the Hollywood Reporter types into a tailspin of doubt.  Because the rest of the season, the next eight episodes are a love letter to American life that I never thought I’d see in a Hollywood production again. 

In real life, Sheridan and much of the cast have found themselves enamored by the majesty of the flyover states, which has rarely happened to famous Hollywood personalities.  And rather than hiding from it, they have embraced it more.  In the case of Sheridan, he has bought ranches and is desperately trying to tell the story of everyday Americans in this struggle with a true phantom menace of Marxism without calling it that.  There are many parts of Season 5 in Yellowstone where Beth Dutton, the daughter of John Dutton and the apparent future of the show, delivers some of the best pro-American lines that have ever been done in entertainment, on the level of Clint Eastwood and John Wayne.  And they were possible because of that setup of ambiguity at the start of the season with the Bible.  Usually, with these kinds of projects and the success that comes with them, any romantic notions that a producer like Taylor Sheridan receives take the ambition out of the projects, and they become more corporate as more people are interested in attaching themselves to the success.  But not here; Yellowstone has become more authentic.  And even though they probably find the idea repulsive, Yellowstone is more MAGA in the notion of Make America Great Again.  They may not want to admit that they like President Trump.  However, they are after the same things Trump and his supporters wish for in life.  We want our country, and we want to love it.  America is speaking and doing so loudly at the heart of the Yellowstone series and all the Taylor Sheridan projects. 

I don’t think Yellowstone planned to be this way from the beginning.  But what it has ended up becoming, and Taylor Sheridan himself, is an authentic love letter to the creation of America.  As I became more interested in these Taylor Sheridan shows, I caught him on a podcast with Joe Rogan talking about the western 1883 and the genuine plight of a new nation needing to fulfill the needs of Manifest Destiny, where advertisements around the world were begging people to come and settle America for a piece of it.  And much of the world, under various forms of tyranny and the early versions of Marxism, wanted more than anything to have a piece of their own life, even if it meant having to come and fight Indians to the death just for the opportunity.  Taylor Sheridan, throughout his various television series, is grappling with this problem, and it all leans toward the reasons America needed to exist in the first place and is stepping away from the Hollywood Marxism that has so ruined entertainment to its present condition.  And because of all that, people love Yellowstone and the other Taylor Sheridan projects.  I am indeed a fan.  There is some real heart in what is being produced around the Yellowstone series, much better than The Godfather or Dallas, which it has been compared to.  Yellowstone is a love letter to America that has needed to happen for a long time.  And it’s a story told by people going through their own transformation into patriotism.  I have always been conservative.  But I am happy to see more people becoming that way as they learn the real history of America, even if it takes success to free them enough to have that point of view.  Watching Yellowstone is worth the effort to get to Season 5.  And whatever happens in the future with the show, what has happened up to this point can’t be undone.  It’s part of America’s story now; and many people will be better because of it.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Great Westerns of Taylor Sheridan: From a perspective of the world, something very unique is going on in America

As of recently, in 2024, it’s true. I had never watched Yellowstone or any of the spinoff shows featured on Paramount Plus but has now been moved onto the Peacock streaming services and NBC as a primetime option.  Yellowstone is one of our current time’s most popular television shows, and I was curious about it.  But my wife and I have not had the time to watch it.  From what I saw of Kevin Costner, who is one of the stars, is that he’s too lefty for me.  And with Taylor Sheridan being a Hollywood actor, I wasn’t interested in watching those types of people make a modern western.  So I put it on hold.  After watching it recently and catching up on many of the shows and spinoffs, especially the Western series 1883, 1923, and Bass Reeves, I can say that there are liberalisms in them I don’t like at all, such as language and sex.  The families are too dysfunctional even though they crave not to be, which naturally comes from the messed up minds of Democrats, who then grow up to be actors, writers, and directors.  One thing that turned me off was that during the production of the show a few years ago, while Yellowstone was at its height of power, as everyone knew what kind of show it was at all levels of production, especially from financing, Kevin Costner showed support for Liz Cheney over President Trump.  So I blew off the whole effort as just another work by a bunch of lefty Hollywood types and did other things.  However, so many people have been talking to me about it and wondering if I dressed the way I do because of the show, that I finally decided to catch up to everything. I can say that it is an excellent show.  A lot is going on.  But as a work of art, our culture is screaming out for attention and respect in so many exciting ways that I think Taylor Sheridan has stumbled onto something significant, and he can’t make enough shows fast enough to fill the need out there. 

Uniquely, I travel a lot and often find myself on the other side of the world watching Asian television.  And all through Europe, they love on television American westerns.  It’s only in America these days that Westerners have been looked down on because there is a genuine Marxist push to destroy our culture, starting with the things we enjoy about it.  But I’m not saying what I do about Westerns because it’s only a regional perspective.  I’ve seen what the rest of the world does in art, entertainment, and literature.  For instance, on television in Japan currently, there is a series called The Tale of Genji, a trendy book from Kyoto about a lady waiting during the 11th century.  I watched some of it in my hotel rooms and what I could stream from referrals by friends.  I enjoyed it enough to grab and read the book while traveling through airports on some of those long layovers.  So when I say that Yellowstone is great, it’s within the context of the world, not just from an American perspective.  Some significant themes are being explored in these Taylor Sheridan shows that are important to the perpetuation of the human race, and some real soul-searching is going on in them that can’t be overlooked.  And I think they are just fantastic and reflect something I have considered since Joe Biden was put in office in 2021. 

Westerns can save America, which I discuss in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  Classic American Westerns, whom I had been referring to, would do just fine if America had ever lost its way, which we are in an age where that has actually happened.  I talk about often that after that horrendous election, my wife and I many times, sometimes with our entire family, packed up and traveled all over the Wild West to reacquaint ourselves with America because it was obviously under attack, and I needed to understand what the heck we were fighting for.  I have a few souvenir cups I use around the house, one from Wall Drug out in South Dakota, one of my favorite places on earth, and another from The Big Texan, from Amarillo, Texas, and my grandkids like seeing them and thinking about their travels with us to those places.  And maybe the Yellowstone show means more to us because we have been to the places where the show talks about, from the Yellowstone park itself to the vast areas of West Texas.  I finished writing my book while on the road in Roswell, New Mexico, and we traveled a lot around West Texas while the rest of the country was on lockdown due to COVID-19.  I also gained an appreciation for the backbone of America, especially when compared to my experience around the world.  My opinions about these things didn’t just come out of nowhere but were formed from experience; by the way, Taylor Sheridan moved from Hollywood, bought a ranch in Texas, and started thinking about the contents of these television shows.  His work is uniquely American and timely, and there is a genuine love in his work for the discussion.  I wouldn’t say that these shows are making the MAGA movement for which President Trump is the spokesman.  However, all of them spawn from the same concerns of American citizens, and these shows capture that sentiment perfectly.  Probably unintentionally, but they are all part of a process of Americans working out what has happened to them over the last hundred years. 

I watched a recent podcast with Joe Rogan and Taylor Sheridan talking about one of the spinoff shows, 1883, and how good it was.  People forget a lot about why the West had to be won, and I think Taylor Sheridan is a lot more sympathetic to the American Indian than I am.  But he tells good, honest stories about the natural history of the American West and how the American government wanted immigrants to populate Western expansion to fulfill the idea of Manifest Destiny.  It’s interesting; most of the world was so oppressed by old-world rules and regulations that they would have done about anything for the prospect of free land in the vast spans of the American West.  They didn’t always know they were going to have to fight Indians for that free land, but it says a lot about human beings that they were willing to fight just for the opportunity to be free of corrupt governments always in their daily lives, the kind of communism we see in Europe and Asia to this day, or the aristocratic kingdoms of that western expansion period.  The story is not about how the Indians were killed for their land as much as it is about why people wanted to flee every corner of the world, and still do to this day, to get away from micromanaging governments and to have a chance to be free.  At the core of the modern Taylor Sheridan westerns is the theme of all his shows, and the conflict that happens along the way is compelling and exciting to all human beings.  But we are waking up to honesty about everything that always needed to happen and wasn’t talked about enough in previous westerns that are unique to these Taylor Sheridan projects, where they are coming from a Democrat perspective and migrating to a classic Republican platform politically.  And I see a lot of hope for the future because of these creative efforts and the way people yearn for them with great fanfare.  And they are certainly worth watching!

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707