Sex, murder and 10-gallon hats: How ‘Yellowstone’ got huge

While filming the third season of “Yellowstone,” Wes Bentley started to feel a shift around him.

He was regularly flying back and forth from shoots in Salt Lake City to his home in Los Angeles, and in real time he felt the show’s popularity start to swell. Over the course of a few months, he went from passengers noticing him on airplanes to the pilots coming up to him on the tarmac and wanting to shake his hand.

“That’s when I realized how massive it had gotten, rather than just big,” says the actor.

It’s gotten even bigger since. “Yellowstone,” a soapy Western about a family of Montana ranch owners and their workers, premiered in 2018 and has become a ratings juggernaut, with viewership nearly doubling every year since its arrival. Last year’s Season 4 finale was watched by 9.3 million people, up from 5.2 million the season finale prior. The fifth season started Sunday on the Paramount Network.

The show stars Kevin Costner as John Dutton, a cutthroat land owner, and Wes Bentley, Kelly Reilly and Luke Grimes as his grown children and heirs to his throne. The show is often described in the media as “Succession” on a ranch, but since “Succession” draws a fraction of “Yellowstone’s” ratings — the HBO drama’s third season finale was seen by 1.7 million viewers — shouldn’t “Succession” be called “Yellowstone” in a New York boardroom?

The perceived bias around the show extends to the Emmys, which in four seasons has nominated the show all of once. But the enterprise keeps steamrolling forward, picking up new fans — when Drake was spotted in Detroit earlier this year, he was wearing “Yellowstone” merch — along the way.

“It kind of gives you a little bit of everything that you want in a show,” says Rich Shappee, 44, of Oxford, Michigan, who like many others got hooked on “Yellowstone” after he and his wife binge-watched it while stuck at home during the pandemic. “It gives you action, it gives you a love story, there are comedy parts, and that’s the fun of watching it. If you’re watching shows with your significant other and you both have different interests, it’s the kind of show you both can agree on. It had everything for both of us.”

“Yellowstone” is created by Taylor Sheridan, the modern day cowboy who wrote the films “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water,” and wrote and directed 2017’s “Wind River.” “Yellowstone” was his first TV series, and he’s rolled its success into the “Yellowstone” spinoff “1883” (two more spinoffs, “1923” and “6666,” are in the pipeline), as well as “Mayor of Kingstown” and the Sylvester Stallone-starring “Tulsa King,” which also started Sunday.

The Taylor Sheridan-verse, as it’s known, is populated with tough-talking, no nonsense characters with conflicted morals and values. They don’t always do the right thing but they try to do the right thing for those around them, and in their feel, setting and approach, his stories are proudly and decidedly Middle America.

That’s where “Yellowstone’s” success started as well, which is one of the reasons the media was slow to pick up on it.

“This has been one of those shows where we were lucky to strike a chord in the interior of America, and now it’s spreading out to the coasts,” says Cole Hauser, who plays fan favorite Rip Wheeler — who is married to John Dutton’s hellzapoppin daughter, Beth — over a Zoom call earlier this month. “It started as a grassroots show. And when you’re going to have success, at least in this day and age, it usually doesn’t start at the coasts and go in.”

Hauser, a veteran actor who has appeared in films such as “Higher Learning,” “Good Will Hunting” and “2 Fast 2 Furious,” credits “Yellowstone’s” success to Sheridan’s writing, the show’s subject matter, its backdrop and the timing of the show. “When’s the last time you’ve seen a great modern Western?” he says. “They’ve just done a great job of slowly spreading this machine called ‘Yellowstone’ across the country, and it’s pretty wild to be in New York and see the reaction from New Yorkers. I just never even thought they would have cared about something like this.”

Actor Gil Birmingham, who on the show plays Thomas Rainwater, a constant thorn in the side of Costner’s character and the chief of a nearby reservation, has been working with Sheridan since “Hell or High Water.” That’s when Sheridan first mentioned “Yellowstone” to him, even though it was still two years away, and Birmingham has been on board with his projects ever since. “I’m just ecstatic that I get to ride the Taylor Sheridan train,” says the actor, who also appeared in “Wind River.”

Birmingham turns 70 next year and has been in Hollywood for more than 35 years, and he had roles in all five “Twilight” movies as Billy Black, the father of Taylor Lautner’s character, Jacob. He says the show’s Montana setting “stirred the imagination” of viewers, especially at a time when they were cooped up in their homes due to COVID-19.

“It was a slow burn in terms of the build up, and we just feel so honored that the fans have embraced it to the extent that they have,” says Birmingham. “I think COVID gave people time to explore the show, and word of mouth really passed around. We’ve always known we were doing quality work, and had some of the best actors and the best locations. The rest was kind of left up to fate, and as fate would have it, they’re loving it.”

“Yellowstone” has sex, fights, family drama, country music, facial hair, picturesque landscapes, “Dallas”-worthy twists and turns, “Sons of Anarchy”-style violence, quotable dialogue, profanity, scheming, horse riding, product placement, characters to root for, characters to root against and more, all elements of a show that hooks you in and does not let go.

It’s the kind of show you not only watch, but want to talk about after.

“Everybody binged it to catch up, but now you want to watch it live,” says Shappee of Oxford, who was planning on being in front of his TV when the new season started. “We’re not doing anything that night. My wife based dinner around it. She wants to have chili so we can chill and relax and be ready when it comes on.”

For Bentley, 44, who plays John Dutton’s troubled, conflicted son Jamie on the show, “Yellowstone” has been a huge boon for his career, and it’s the biggest thing he’s been a part of since he starred in “American Beauty” in 1999. But he’s focusing on his character and trying his best to keep everything surrounding the show out of his mind.

“It’s meant a lot, and for my career it’s huge, but I’m really trying to focus on Jamie,” he says. “It’s such a hard character to play. And I really want to make sure I see it out the right way. It’s not only that (the hype) can get to your head, but it gets to everything. You can start to play your role different, or I start to think about how I can set myself up for the next thing, and I just don’t want to do that. I’ve found success in really honing down and focusing on him, and it takes a good month or two for me to shake out of it anyway. And by the time I’ve shaken out of it, it’s time to go back.”

Fans aren’t always willing to let him shake out of it when they see Bentley out in public, he says.

“People come up to me and they want to give therapy to Jamie, people want to ask how he’s doing and give him some advice,” Bentley says. “It’s fun to be in places and have people yell across the room to you that they hate you. But you know, they do it with a smile on their face.”