Yellowstone - Season One
Imagine the "Romeo and Juliet" story, but Romeo and Juliet are married and have a kid, the important thing is they come from two different, feuding families: The Dutton family, led by the powerful patriarch John Dutton (Kevin Costner), a man who controls the largest contiguous ranch in the United States and an unnamed Native American tribe with an ambitious new Chief, Chief Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham). The dispute between these two powerful figures and their "children" will lead to manslaughter and vengeance.
This is just one of the central narratives in "Yellowstone: Season 1," an original Paramount Network television series, also starring Wes Bentley, Kelly Reilly, Luke Grimes and Cole Hauser. It's not unlike the primetime soap opera from the 1980s "Dallas," but with more sophisticated storytelling, more refined filmmaking and more appealing location shooting.
This highly-watched series comes from Taylor Sheridan, the Academy Award-nominated writer of "Hell or High Water," "Wind River" and "Sicario." With movies like these, he has begun to garner a reputation as a voice of the new American West. It's still a world of cowboys and Indians, but the dynamics are far more complicated than they were before. Sheridan takes archetypal characters and archetypal scenarios and infuses them with modern politics and a sincere knowledge of the setting in which his stories take place.
The Dutton family ranch, a great symbol of agrarian American and Manifest Destiny, is under attack on all of its borders from the Native Americans, land developers, and of course, the series' namesake, America's first National Park. There are no more frontiers, just land, and everyone wants it. These are the billionaires that you rarely hear about, some of the world's largest oil and lumber conglomerates, corporations who tear through the resources and sully the countryside. There's money at stake so public endangerment and even murder are all cards on the table.
Like most good dramas, these big ideas are narrowed down to the scope of the family. There's Kayce (Grimes), John's son who lives on the reservation with his Native American wife and son. His sister Beth, a financer and master manipulator with a substance abuse problem. And Jamie (Bentley), an attorney and aspiring politician, frustrated with the state of his clan.
This impressive Blu-ray disc collection includes all the episodes in Season 1 as well as a number of special features, including looks at the characters, the production design, the special effects and the original music. Plus, Sheridan and Costner talk intimately about the production here too.
"Yellowstone: Season 1"
DVD $35.95