The "Yellowstone" TV Show Is Over, but Not the Damage It’s Done to the West
The caricatured version of Montana sold by the show is helping ruin a place its creators never truly understood.
Johnathan Hettinger
Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers.
I remember my first conversation about Yellowstone, the wildly popular western TV show that just wrapped up its fifth and final season earlier this month. This was 2018, and I was sitting in the middle of the dirt street outside the Mint Bar in Livingston, Montana. This wasn’t the Old West, only routine maintenance: Public works was re-doing all of downtown and had closed the streets to cars and ripped up the asphalt. The Mint took advantage of the situation and put some chairs and tables in the middle of the street.
I had just moved to town, and Livingston seemed to me like a place of dreams. My rent was $450 a month (if my landlord even remembered to ask for it), and I paid it fairly easily on the $13.50-per-hour I made as a reporter for the last afternoon daily newspaper in the country. In a matter of minutes, I could be out on the Yellowstone River in a kayak. Yellowstone National Park lay an hour’s drive to the south and I went multiple times a month. I camped in the Crazy Mountains, in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness and on islands in the middle of the river.
Sitting outside the Mint that evening, I was telling a friend I was excited for Yellowstone’s debut later that week. It was set in the county and probably at least partially based on a local family we knew. My friend was not excited. She knew some people who were working on the show and she told me it was going to be bad, both as a show and for the place. She could see the writing on the wall and was racing to buy a house before prices skyrocketed.
Six years later, as Yellowstone
wraps up, it sickens me to see how right she was, to see the lasting
harm the series has done to Montana, and Park County in particular. The
sanitized, caricatured version of the West sold by the show now
dominates the public identity of a region the show and its creators
never truly understood. For all its appeals to cowboy “authenticity,”
the show has helped ruin a very real place.
Land is being gobbled up by billionaires seeking retreats from the chaos they created elsewhere on the planet, through fracking, mining and commodifying land. The house my friend was fortunate enough to buy back then is worth a staggering amount more now. Many other friends and longtime residents have been priced out.
By the time I, too, moved away six months ago, my rent had more than tripled, and I was tired of working multiple jobs to pay it.
It’s still paradise — for those who can afford it.
At its best, Yellowstone flirted with important themes: the cultural battle for the American West, the tensions between development and conservation, the harms of colonization, and how extreme wealth is pushing out families who have lived in Montana for generations.
But Yellowstone rarely delivered on these ambitions. The final episode, like much of the show, failed to resolve its central conflicts — such as “Will anyone face consequences for anything?” and “Can this place be saved?” Instead, the finale exemplified the show’s deeper flaws: its inability to reckon with the moral weight of its story and its insistence on glorifying the Duttons.
The ranch’s sale back to the (mythical) Broken Rock Tribe for $1.25 an acre — the price the Duttons “paid” for it when they homesteaded — should have been a moment of reckoning, perhaps even a gesture toward reparations. Instead, it was framed as a magnanimous act by the Duttons, cementing their role as noble defenders of tradition rather than perpetrators of violence and dispossession.
This moral distortion is perfectly encapsulated in a jarring scene near the end: after the tribe reclaims the ranch, a group of Native teens vandalizes the Dutton family graveyard, toppling headstones. An elder scolds them, insisting that the Duttons were an important part of the land’s heritage and deserve respect.
The scene, like the entire show, is bizarre in that it asks the audience to sympathize with the Duttons despite their long legacy of murder and land grabbing and their general unpleasantness.
It’s clumsy, self-serving storytelling that repeatedly chooses to glorify myths instead of searching for meaning in the very real changes sweeping the rural west.
For all its violent posturing, Yellowstone lacked the courage to actually make the characters face consequences for their actions. The Duttons — violent, entitled and remorseless — claimed to protect the land they stole, dumping bodies at the “Train Station,” crushing enemies (including the Broken Rock Tribe), and manipulating family members. Yet, the show rewarded these actions with unearned happy endings: Beth plots to murder her brother and rides off with her own ranch; Kayce finds his paradise; and Jamie — adopted and perpetually vilified — is killed without remorse.
Meanwhile, the ranch hands, branded like cattle and dragged into the Duttons’ crimes, were treated as props rather than people. Instead of exploring the realities of laboring on a massive ranch — with no hope of ever owning one — the show glorifies their hardships, ignoring questions of rent, survival or dignity. They don’t question being hung out to dry by the Duttons at the end of the show; instead, after they’re kicked off the ranch and laid off, they go to concerts, reconnect with lost lovers, and are excited to find new ranches where they can be mistreated. They all seem to be having a grand ol’ time.
Rather than presenting them as people escaping an exploitative system, the show reduces them to accessories, depriving them of the complexity most viewers could actually relate to.
The series also gestured at themes of environmental loss but failed to convey the real stakes. As someone who lived in Park County and saw the relentless push of development, it was frustrating to watch. The last 2% of habitat for grizzlies and bison is disappearing, eaten away by the kind of development the Duttons spend the show fighting. And yet Yellowstone’s main impact was to accelerate the seemingly infinite demand for “a slice of paradise.”
Compared to much of the country, Southwest Montana is still a truly wild place — a refuge for wildlife and people. But that’s precisely why so much remains at stake. Every new house, every new 20-acre ranchette and subdivision chasing the dream of “paradise,” chips away at one of the last intact ecosystems on Earth.
When I think of Yellowstone, I’ll remember the place it came to dominate in our culture: the way it inspired at least three couples in my Midwestern family to dress up as Beth and Rip for Halloween, the way it mythologized a version of the West at its worst, the way it glorified private property over all else. I’ll remember my next door neighbor in Illinois who had a bumper sticker threatening to take people to the “Train Station.” I’ll remember the Duttons demonizing Yellowstone National Park and rerouting the river. I’ll remember how it was set, but not filmed, in Park County.
And I’ll remember the damage it left behind: a Park County warped by gentrification, where an intact ecosystem has been commodified into a backdrop for cosplay and profit.
Yellowstone aspired to be a prestige drama, a modern Western epic. But it failed to capture what truly makes the West great: the land, the wildlife, the clean water and the people who care for it. No wonder Kevin Costner couldn’t be bothered to finish the series (though Horizon, the pet project film series he left to show complete, doesn’t offer any new perspective).
Instead, Yellowstone celebrated greed, violence and wealth. Its ending was as muddled as its message, leaving behind a legacy that Montana — and television — would be better off without.
Now, we have four Yellowstone spin-offs to look forward to. Like the developers busy packaging Park County for sale, it seems what the show’s creators really care about isn’t the place, it’s the money.
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Johnathan Hettinger is a journalist based in Central Illinois, where he grew up. A graduate of the University of Illinois, he has worked at the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, the Livingston Enterprise and the (Champaign-Urbana) News-Gazette. Contact Johnathan at jhett93@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @jhett93.
