It certainly sounds like the Yellowstone co-creator wishes they would have stuck to the original, three-season-plan for the Kevin Costner-led show.
For much of its run, Yellowstone was the biggest show on the planet. Much of that was thanks to the Academy Award-winning actor in the lead role: Kevin Costner. While he was a part of the series, it was must-watch television. When he was written out of the show in Season 5, it limped to the finish line.
How could it not? Big time shows always struggle when they try to move on without their main character.
Taylor Sheridan recently sat down on The Bill Simmons Podcast and talked a little bit about how the show ended, and how it should have wrapped up. The mind behind countless current TV hits (like Landman and Dutton Ranch) first provided a funny anecdote about Paramount’s now defunct development department, and how he lacked respect for them:
“When I first started at Paramount, there was a huge development department. There were all these people whose job it was to sit there and give me notes and tell me what to do and how to do it. And after four years, they got rid of that department. All those people got fired, because they didn’t need them, because I wasn’t returning their calls. I didn’t respect them, because they don’t do what I do.”
Talk about a power move (and at the end of the day, Sheridan is right).
No one else was coming up with storylines and doing the world building that Taylor Sheridan was, and the man who will soon be paid more than a billion dollars to take his talents over to NBCUniversal says that he and Costner originally laid out Yellowstone to only last three seasons.
That’s why Costner’s contract only initially spanned three seasons, and why fans probably remember Yellowstone‘s Season 3 finale ending in chaotic and up-in-the-air fashion:
“With ‘Yellowstone,’ Kevin Costner was only supposed to be in the first three seasons. That was in his contract. And in my mind, that’s when his youngest son takes over and then we watch him lose that ranch or not lose it, whatever the case is gonna be.”
In other words, Kayce was supposed to have the keys handed over to him much, much earlier.
How that would have played out? Who knows, but Sheridan says that Paramount couldn’t fathom the idea of the show not having Costner in the leading role:
“The network was so scared of not having Kevin be a part of it. Even though Kevin was ready to go. He had other things he wanted to do. He stayed on for another two seasons and that was just because the show was such a behemoth and such a huge hit that the notion of giving up a hit before it had run of juice to squeeze is very foreign to a network.
Finally, Kevin hit a point where he said, ‘I gotta do my own thing.’ But we originally conceived it together that it was three seasons and then the baton is handed… Because we had to tread water for a bit there, and I think it was pretty evident.”
That’s the old show business adage, right? You always want to leave the audience wanting more. For Yellowstone, it continued on for another two seasons after the initial three that Sheridan and Costner laid out, and then had to figure out on the fly how to go on without Costner. Of course, most of the conversation in the media seemed to point to some kind of power struggle between Sheridan and Costner, but according to Sheridan, that doesn’t seem to be the case at all.
Would it have been better off wrapping up with Season 3? It’s tough to say. But it does sound like in an ideal world, Sheridan and Costner would have been able to end the hit show together, and on their terms.
