Season 6 Rendered Pointless by Yellowstone's Biggest Fail

Summary

• Paramount's Yellowstone has raked in huge numbers and been praised by audiences.
• In spite of the high production values, the neverending melodrama has been recycled one too many times.
• Yellowstone now has more in common with a soap opera than a prestige drama.

Prestige Looks

What is it that makes a prestige drama? Is it an all-star cast? Incredible cinematography? Locations that look real, instead of CGI-generated? Or is it just a really good script?

If you had asked back in – oh, say season 3 – both critics and audiences would have agreed that Yellowstone ticked all those boxes. The show has always looked gorgeous, thanks to the fact that it's filmed on location in Montana rather than in a Hollywood studio. From day one, the Kevin Costner-headed cast has been top notch. And while some accused Taylor Sheridan 's script of being soapy right from the pilot, the story of feuding ranches in the American northwest struck a deep chord with audiences.

Prestige Numbers

Yellowstone has even managed to rack up the rare accomplishment of finding a huge following both on cable and on streaming platforms. Audiences tune in en masse when new episodes are aired on the Paramount Network, while Yellowstone marathons are a big thing during Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July (apparently a time that Americans are feeling nostalgic for the cowboy days). In fact, Yellowstone has officially beat out The Walking Dead to become the most-watched show on cable.

Meanwhile, the series has been wildly successful on CBS, and the various spin-offs have found their own success on Paramount+.

But as we gear up for the second half of Season 5, it's becoming clear that perhaps Yellowstone has started to turn into a soapy, pulpy mess… or maybe it was one all along.

Is Yellowstone A Soap Opera Now?

While Yellowstone has always had soapy elements – the wealthy feuding families, the sex, the intrigue, the outdoor bathing – it's been clear throughout season five that we've tipped fully into soap opera land.

What ultimately characterizes a soap opera? It's not the dramatic music, or the cliffhangers. It's the melodrama. It's the fact that characters frequently make decisions based on sentimentality instead of common sense. And, most crucially, it's the fact that characters never seem to change much in the long run, even though they are regularly going through intense personal conflict and supposedly learning moral lessons.

Melodrama? Check. Everyone is constantly beating each other up, blowing each other up, or branding each other in a manly, psychotic fashion. The felonies have really started to stack up.

Decisions based on sentimentality rather than an ounce of common sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I present the character of Beth Dutton every minute of every episode. Not to mention almost everyone else around her.

Characters never changing? Think about it: the answer is definitely yes. How many times over the years have Beth and Jamie had a huge, eerily similar fight? How often do Kayce and Monica fight about the kind of man he's turning into? How many times will Rip get into a physical fight with whoever happens to be in his way this week?

We're five seasons in, and the only characters who have ever gotten any meaningful development have been minor side characters. Go back to the pilot episode and you may be surprised to find that John Dutton, Beth, Kayce, and Jamie are all basically unchanged. You could go from episode one to the most recent episode of season five and you wouldn't have missed any real character growth.

Is There a Point to Season 6?

Knowing all of this, will there be any surprises in Season 6? It seems likely that the drama will get even more ludicrous (it has to, in order to top what's come before), that Kayce will be a bit directionless, that Jamie will maneuver to get ahead politically, that Beth will still struggle to function like a human being.

To be fair, critics way back in season one were calling Yellowstone what it was: reviewing the pilot, Entertainment Weekly called it 'soapy trash that badly wants to be taken seriously'. Yellowstone's biggest mistake wasn't the melodrama. It's that it never evolved, and now the audience sees it for what it was all along.