The Ultimate Boomer Bait
The Ultimate Boomer Bait
Rob Henderson on Yellowstone, Season 1
Rob Henderson joins me to discuss Season 1 of Yellowstone. I had only heard about the show when I saw a controversy blow up on Twitter where Matt Walsh was attacking boomers for liking it while denouncing the series as woke propaganda.
Rob uses a phrase that I love to describe the series: “profoundly unsophisticated.” Every character tells you exactly what they’re thinking or what they’re planning at each moment. You get wild coincidences and strange chance encounters that add shootouts, horse chases, and action scenes to the show without having much basis in the plot. The politics are just as unsophisticated as the plot and character development, being based in a primitive kind of NIMBY fundamentalism and anti-rich animus, with a progressive but not exactly woke worldview on social issues.
All of that being said, Rob and I are going to keep watching. As smart guys, we like sophisticated shows, but it can also be fun to turn your brain off for an hour and enjoy shootouts and the Montana landscape. And, I suspect, deep down, we feel joy at the thought of continuing to snigger at boomers and what they consider sophisticated entertainment as we imagine observing a show like this through their eyes. Ok, maybe not Rob, but that’s definitely what’s going to keep me watching.
We laughed a lot during this one. I think you’ll enjoy it, even if you haven’t seen the show.
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The Ultimate Boomer Bait
Interesting take. I saw a few episodes of the show on a plane and found it unappealing for basically the same reasons Rob describes, but I’ve heard the show described as ‘peak tv for red states’- so I’m surprised to see it described as progressive or hear that conservative activists are dragging it. My impression was that it’s meant to present people who do things like cattle ranching as heroic figures preserving a virtuous way of life in the face of less virtuous modern ways of living like actually making money.
The show’s apparent popularity among right wing boomers is rather revealing about some of the pathologies of this demographic in my view. The very fact that John Dutton is regarded as some kind of protagonist is amusing in its own right as he’s basically launching an actual war that results in several deaths just to prevent anyone from disrupting his antiquated hobbies; the way that outsiders and ‘transplants’ (basically people who have real jobs and want to conduct regular business in Montana) are depicted as cartoon villains is eye-rolling. I was genuinely unclear if the audience is meant to sympathize with the Duttons at all but I think they are considered the protagonists, even when engaging in unsavory behavior.
I often hear from right wing media that liberal elites look down at rural conservatives and think they are better. In my view, this has it backwards: urban liberals don’t think about rural America much at all- the idea that some hipsters in Brooklyn are wasting any brain space on the goings on in rural Montana reflects a weird kind of delusional narcissism. By contrast, as reflected in this show, rural conservatives create whole tv series devoted to depicting themselves as superior to everyone else, featuring lurid fantasies of physical violence carried out against outsiders and long diatribes against ‘transplants.’ I can’t think of a counter example of a liberal tv show where some hipster gives an extended soliloquy about how much better he is than cattle ranchers and then arranges to have them murdered purely out of spite. But maybe I’ve been misreading the show altogether and everyone else agrees that the Duttons are losers.
I'd disagree that Yellowstone is woke - it quite deliberately lets characters have different points of view and doesn't try at all to cram an ideology down its viewers' throats. It's no accident that Beth, who is profoundly unwoke, has become a wildly popular character among women viewers, for example. And Thomas Rainwater isn't very woke as the ex-Wall Street tribal chief committed to using the market to recover tribal lands.
You might take a look at the special issue of PERC Reports from the Property and Environment Research Center, where a number of PERC-affiliated folks (including me) wrote about free market environmental themes we found in particular scenes in the show. Taylor Sheridan joined us via Zoom for part of the conference where we discussed our pieces and in his remarks he stressed his view that entertainment shows shouldn't be pushing ideologies on viewers but let them make up their own minds. https://www.perc.org/2021/12/06/the-yellowstone-we-know/