Just to clarify once more… when you tune in to The Madison, there won’t be any Duttons walking through that door.
The newest show from the mind of Taylor Sheridan is described as the Yellowstone creator’s most intimate work… or as Kurt Russell put it, “female gaze-oriented.” It tells a story that explores grief and human connection, and as far as plot is concerned, the series revolves around the titular character of Stacy Clyburn (played by Michelle Pfeiffer), a wealthy matriarch who upends her life in New York City to move her and her family to Montana following a plane crash that kills her husband (played by Kurt Russell) and brother-in-law.
The series premiered this past weekend, releasing the first three episodes of Season 1 all at once. And fans won’t have to wait long for more episodes. In fact, they actually only have to wait one week for the inaugural season to conclude. The final three episodes of The Madison’s six-episode season drop on Paramount+ this upcoming Saturday (March 21). But fans shouldn’t worry… the second season of the Michelle Pfeiffer-led show has actually already been shot.
So I’ve got a feeling that there won’t be that long of a wait between Seasons 1 and 2.
Though if fans are waiting for Yellowstone characters to appear in The Madison, that’s not ever going to happen. After it was teased for years as a Yellowstone spinoff, The Madison made sure to separate itself from that existing brand just a couple of months before it premiered. It was kind of a surprising clarification, and one that was made very late in the proceedings. Clarification was directly provided to Whiskey Riff, and all over the internet, publications were still billing it as a Yellowstone spinoff series.
And based on a quote from one of the stars of the show, the fans weren’t the only ones caught off guard by the announcement. Patrick J. Adams, who plays someone that married into the Clyburn family in the series, told The Hollywood Reporter that he and others involved in the series kept waiting to see how the Dutton family would tie into the show.
Eventually, they were told just the like rest of us that The Madison would stand alone as it’s own story:
“We kept waiting for a script to drop where a Dutton would come. That was certainly a question because that’s how it was in the world. And when we asked about it, it was like, ‘No, no, no. This is an independent thing. This is its own thing.’”
So it sounds like a lot of people were kept in the dark about it, or led to believe something that didn’t end up coming to fruition. Or… something changed last minute?
And to be clear, it was initially billed as a Yellowstone sequel, and was actually announced all the way back in 2023, before the flagship series had even gone off the air. The Madison was actually considered the first-ever Yellowstone sequel… until it wasn’t. It’s believed that Taylor Sheridan may have changed his mind about it tying into the Yellowstone universe once he actually started writing it.
But no need to fret if all that will-Yellowstone-spinoff, won’t-Yellowstone-spinoff talk stirs up anxiety. Even though The Madison is not a spinoff, the director of the series (and Yellowstone alum), Christina Voros, says that it has all the same feel and familiarity of a Taylor Sheridan show:
“Any time you get a show together with a cast like this you kind of want it to go forever. And I think having completed the second season, you just fall more and more in love with them as a family.
What’s interesting about it is that it’s very much going to resonate with people who have been watching shows in the Yellowstone-verse for a very long time, but it’s also going to draw in people who would not necessarily gravitate to the more muscular and masculine action-driven content of some of Taylor’s bigger shows like Yellowstone or Lioness. It is a simpler story in many ways on the surface, but infinitely more complicated, emotionally, underneath it.”
Well… so far, it certainly hasn’t garnered the positive reviews that most Taylor Sheridan shows have. It has a 64% and 68% percent on Rotten Tomatoes, from both critics and fans respectively, which is overall the worst showing of any series written by Taylor Sheridan (he didn’t write Marshals). We’ll see how it shakes out, but as of right now, it hasn’t exactly been an overwhelming success.
The first three episodes are currently streaming on Paramount+. The final three episodes of Season 1 will drop this upcoming weekend. As for when fans can expect the second season of The Madison to become available, that has yet to be announced. At one point, they were considering airing both seasons back-to-back, but there’s no official word on when Season 2 will air.
