Yellowstone, Season 5

When movie stars inevitably age, they typically retire to hide their wrinkles and liver spots in private or they are reduced to bit parts as character actors. Kevin Costner was incredibly lucky that, just as he was entering his Twilight Years, along came Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone giving him the starring role in what rapidly became the most popular show on television.

But that wasn’t good enough for Costner. Did he take offense at playing the role of a rugged individualist, right-wing millionaire land baron? Or was he simply jealous of Taylor Sheridan’s entertainment empire building and acclaim?

Reportedly, he wanted less time involvement in Yellowstone to work on his own (rivalrous Western) epic passion project, “Horizon: An American Saga” (2024).

“Horizon” Part 1 showed up a few months ago and proved to be a bloated, expensive, and ineffably pretentious yawner, simultaneously viewing the arrival of white pioneers to settle (and do what with?) the scenic, but waterless and barren, Sonoran desert of Arizona and its impact on the already resident Apaches.

Those settlers are not mining, and God knows what they could possibly grow there, and they are not seen building Phoenix or Tucson, so the viewer tends to imagine these deluded people will soon give up and give it back to the red man anyway, the 19th century market for Saguaro cactus and cholla being somewhat limited.

So Costner deliberately threw away a terrific role, if not “the role of a lifetime,” certainly an absolutely marvelous vehicle for “an aged man.. a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.”

If I were Taylor Sheridan, I believe I’d have had John Dutton fall into an outhouse and drown or possibly meet an unhappy end via the hoofs of a cow he’d developed a crush on.

The untimely departure of Costner undoubtedly threw a major monkey wrench into Yellowstone’s intended Season 5 plotting, but Taylor Sheridan last night proved capable of cowboying up and going on sans Costner.

Yellowstone is no longer the show it was, and it will not go on exactly as previously planned, but it has still got a terrific cast and a number of great characters. I’d bet that it will continue to be a hit. And I’ll also bet that Horizon, Part 2 will be just as pointless, pretentious, as boring as Part 1.