Predicting Yellowstone Plot Points Based on Years of Grandma TV

“Recently I saw an ad for Yellowstone, that Kevin Costner ranching show, and thought that if I were still speaking to my grandmother I’d probably have a working knowledge of the main cast, the major plot points of at least the first three seasons, and an opinion as to which season marked the beginning of the show’s decline. But as I don’t speak to either of my grandmothers, I’ve never seen it.”

Here is my best guess, without either watching the show or checking out the IMDB page, of what Yellowstone is like, based solely on previous knowledge of Kevin Costner’s whole deal and a few city-bus ads. Secondary sources include all the shows my grandmother Verna and my great-aunt Earline watched when I visited them for most of the weekends I attended an evangelical Christian commuter college in the San Gabriel Valley: Law & Order (SVU, Criminal Intent, and original flavor), Blue Bloods, JAG, CSI, 60 Minutes, Chopped, NCIS, Crossing Jordan, Judging Amy, Boston Legal, Shark Tank, Jeopardy, and Call the Midwife.

People I know to be on the show Yellowstone from the posters:

Kevin Costner

Gil Birmingham

People I believe must appear at least once on the show Yellowstone:

Bridget Moynahan as Sydney Whitlock. She is either Kevin Costner’s first wife, in which case she is a slightly reserved, deeply committed co-parent who quietly tolerates his second wife, while Kevin Costner so frequently relies on her excellent judgment and sound business acumen that his second wife is actually jealous of her, or she is Kevin Costner’s only wife, in which case they were high school sweethearts despite a pretty obvious fifteen-year age gap.

Justina Machado as Detective Sally Diaz, recurring season two. Arrives in Yellowstone to investigate a missing person but is removed from the case after taking bribes from whoever is the head of the family that rivals Kevin Costner’s family. The Langleys, maybe, or the Colleymoores. Or Dutch Pierce.

Damian Young as morally compromised local sheriff Bill Curran longing to do right who dies at the end of the third season. Not exactly a catch phrase, more like an emotionally resonant stinger that he repeats once or twice a season, to increasingly chilling effect: “Let’s bring him in.”

Peter Mullan, doing an American accent as Rab Curran, a sugar-beet farmer who opposes all new development, even a new grocery store, and shoots everyone he doesn’t know on his property, which will sometimes be played for laughs and then towards the end of each season will start to get played straight.

Zahn McClarnon as Kevin Costner’s best friend and, I guess, ranch consigliere. I feel like this show probably thinks of ranchers as old-timey mafia dons, rare symbols of graceful masculine dignity in a rapidly-changing world, who talk a lot more about their legacy than animal husbandry, so he probably has a consigliere.

Tyne Daly as The Governor. Plotlines will include “The Governor grows suspicious of Kiely’s plans for a casino,” “The Governor takes a closed-door meeting with the Breedloves,” and “The Governor arrives.” Always wears gloves, an attentive and loving grandmother of six, has her own stud farm, probably behind like 60% of the violence on the show but also ends up hiring one of Kevin Costner’s granddaughters right out of high school and does a really amazing job mentoring her, so it’s complicated.

Richard Thomas as, I want to say, either a cheerful federal pipeline investigator whose disappearance prompts the arrival of Det. Diaz, or a political rival who challenges Tyne Daly in her second-season bid for re-election as governor. Or maybe she’s the governor of Montana and he’s the governor of Wyoming, and his courtly geniality contrasts with her big-hat intensity until we find out he’s actually every bit as violent as she is, and there’s a really fun scene where she develops a new respect for him as a result. And he’s always wearing fun little scarves.

Jeffrey DeMunn as the last holdout among the small-time ranchers, with a critically-located two-hundred-acre spread, and at some point the big-time guys who are leaning on him to sell will find out that he’s secretly dying (Jeffrey DeMunn is always secretly dying on TV shows) and can finally leverage his anxiety to secure an inheritance for his twelve-year-old grandson (expect to hear the word “legacy” a lot) to soften him, only he’ll still get to have a stirring little scene where he dies with his boots on before they can get to him, and the ensuing legal turmoil over the will and the twelve-year-old’s interest in taking over a ranch will take up the first half of the second season.

Judy Reyes as the woman holding the Garcia family together. Every family on Yellowstone has an actress in her fifties who is “holding the family together.”

Adam Beach as somebody with a really strong-sounding name. Mateo Shaw. Addeus Vector. Huxley Creek. Maybe he briefly dates one of Kevin Costner’s blonde daughters (Kevin Costner will have at least three blonde daughters). Always wearing work gloves, in any given twenty-four hours he will have repaired a fence. He’s got some bad news about the coyot’ on the north fence. Hates being used as a political pawn.

Lance Reddick is maybe an old Army buddy of Kevin Costner’s (Kevin Costner was in the Montana Reserves or something during the last few years of Vietnam), maybe the head of the largest construction firm in Montana, but then he’s secretly got money problems that Kevin Costner doesn’t know about, which leads him to get into bed with the Governor, maybe, or the Langley-Harringtons (Kevin Costner’s rival family allies itself with some South Dakota family that made its money in aerospace contracts in the third season), and is ultimately forced to betray Kevin Costner against his will (because he has to protect his legacy for his children).

Clancy Brown is the local bartender, maybe. They won’t want to cast him as anything as heavy as in Shawshank, but this way he can still occasionally crack the skulls of a few disrespectful out-of-town drunks to remind you he’s still hard.

Timothy Omundson is going to be either a crooked water rights official named something like Gav Huntson, or Elias Sheridan, the head of some board that wants to bring new development into town, making an enemy of Peter Mullan.

James Roday as one of Kevin Costner’s slightly-disappointing sons (the best son, Boots, died in Afghanistan in 2005, played in flashbacks by Bill Skarsgård) who’s always trying to prove himself but makes too many jokes and never looks quite right on a horse. Has a big father-son showdown with Kevin Costner about twice a season, and is probably married to an Emilia Clarke type who’s not half as good at scheming as she thinks she is, but who nevertheless invests all her energy in trying to make her father-in-law proud of her husband. There will be another slightly-disappointing son who left the state to go to college (either Berkeley or an East Coast Ivy) and is now back to prove himself, leading both brothers to view one another with suspicion as each tries to prove himself at the expense of the other. The out-of-town brother will be played by someone like Ed Westwick, only obviously not Ed Westwick, but someone who you’d still be a little surprised to see turn up on a show like Yellowstone.

Jodi Long as, I want to say, an animal rights activist who shakes things up in season two named…Eden Westcott.

Charisma Carpenter joins the cast in season four as a potential love interest and business rival for Kevin Costner after either his second wife leaves him or, if only married once, his first wife dies in a ground-breaking accident, destroying the already-shaky Langerty-Albhorm alliance and scrapping any plans for a ski resort/oil pipeline/planned fly-in private airport and golf community for another season. TV Guide, if it still exists, will summarize her debut with something like “she (Charisma Carpenter) is ready to shake things up and isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty.”

Additional guesses:

• Anyone who has ever had a speaking role in any of the John Wick movies will eventually make an appearance

• Ditto Billions and, strangely enough, Becker

• Every sixth male character on the show will be named “Gray”

• Gretchen Mol will appear in flashbacks only

• Anyone who performed at the Grand Old Opry in the 1990s will be automatically granted a four-episode arc

• The Season One finale will be titled “Ace in the Hole”

• At least one character will refer to getting drunk as “getting roostered up”

• The Season Two premiere will be called “The Ten-Cent Man”

• In an episode where Kevin Costner’s character lies comatose in the hospital after being unexpectedly shot, Kevin Costner will provide voiceover narration about the code of the Old West (“You don’t ride a man’s horse without his permission”)

• You better believe Tom Welling is going to show up at some point

• Ditto James Brolin

• There will be an absolutely insane car-to-character ratio on the show. Everyone twelve and up will have at least three cars to their name, to say nothing of trucks, and Kevin Costner will drive a different classic car or army surplus vehicle in every scene.

• All the women will be incredibly good at like, barrel-racing and commodities trading, unless they work for the federal government.

• Kevin Costner will find a way to pass on his legacy to someone worthy, even in these changing times, possibly to someone named Jute

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