Absolutely hilarious to me that the very goofy super entertaining openly melodramatic cowboy soap opera has become a culture war talking point for the kind of insufferably tedious people that spend all their time on Twitter virtue signaling about how much they hate virtue signaling instead of spending time with their grandkids or something.

Yellowstone is purely ridiculous in its plotting, completely removed from the reality of modern ranching in a microcosm and 'western' politics as a macrocosm, and incredibly fun because of it - especially Kelly Reilly and Wes Bentley who 100% realize what kind of show they are in and what kind of performances it needs - but good lord, the absolute irony of its most ardent and passionate fanboys who take it way too seriously being the kind of fake cowboys that the show itself considers its internal enemy is so delicious that it actually makes the show better in of itself. Newsflash, if you think Yellowstone is owning the libs or whatever I can guarantee you are closer to the try hard out of towners in the valley desperate for 'authenticity' and cosplaying in their cowboy hats than you are to the Duttons, the same way most people who think they are Ricks are really Mortys.

The first three seasons are all good and get better the more over the top they get, but season four seems to be running out of steam, most likely because almost half of the running time was used as backdoor pilots for at least three spin offs which we all know is the signal of a show stretched too thin, but as long as they resist some of the more obvious pitfalls due to it catapulting into the mass audience it should stay solid.

For fans of Deadwood, Slim Cessna's Auto Club, and Passions.

Legitimately bad writing. All the scenes seem to needlessly end in escalation, hostility or outright violence to the point it's exhausting. There are shows about gangs, drug dealers and hit men with fewer murders per season.

This ranch has an implausibly high body count, dozens if not hundreds of people have been murdered here and there's not been anyone looking into it? None of the lazily disposed of bodies get investigated? This one farmer is powerful enough to keep away state and federal police for decades?

For whatever reason everyone is perpetually wanting to fight. They'll just escalate the most trivial interactions into a fight. Guy asks you for money? Bash his face in. Someone wants to quit their job? Kill them. Even the most aggro person wouldn't escalate to fighting as often as these people do just out of laziness/exhaustion.

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**Spoiler for S01E01:**

The characters are extremely shallow, always trotting out the same spiels and back story. They will all talk endlessly about how traumatised they are about the death of their mother decades earlier without a single mention of their other dead family member who died on the show and is seemingly never mentioned again.
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Ultimately the whole show feels like a badly written soap opera, obscenely implausible scenarios occuring on a ranch with a body count in the hundreds. The characters become caricatures of themselves, dialogue and character development is shallow with the plot falling apart with even the slightest thought.