The beginning of 2018 had seemed seriously unappetizing. It was enough the arrival of spring and especially the opening of the summer season, usually not very full of important TV events, to reverse the course and offer us interesting pilots and titles.
Sharp Objects for example, but also Killing Eve, Who is America and Patrick Melrose just to name a few, have been able to capture the audience and create in a few episodes a good audience and / or critics.
In this context we are going to insert a series that is not so much awaited and publicized but that it would not be wrong to decree as one of the best series of the year.
I'm talking about Yellowstone, a Paramount Network product that sees the arrival on TV of another Hollywood 90's piece, although in decline, like Kevin Kostner. The actor of Bodyguard, Balla Coi Lupi Lupi and Gli Untoccabili plays the main character John Dutton, here supported by an excellent cast of old acquaintances and new entries that form a set of strong and elegant personalities even if in the roughness of the characters they play. John Dutton plays the pater familias of the Dutton lineage, a dynasty that has long reigned unchallenged in the famous Yellowstone park where John is a kind of king who, on the one hand, carries out personal interests that are beyond the avarice and power craving typical of certain patriarchs or de facto rulers of contemporary society, and on the other hand, carries out a safeguard of the world that Yellowstone represents, an oasis of peace where nature is the background and undisputed protagonist.
And it is precisely uncontaminated nature that is the favorite subject for twilight shots and scenes with bison, wolves, cows or wild horses that often peep out between one story and another, ending up being the subject of diatribes and clashes with social implications and dramatic consequences.
John Dutton reigns unchallenged but the world is about to change, his world is threatened on many fronts, with investors in suits dreaming of villas and palaces to stand on the park and the Indian tribe claiming the paternity of the soil that John tramples on.
John's tough, hardened and determined character will soon lead him to start a war without quarter with what he considers invaders, and to do so he will use his remaining children at his side, weaving his way and his gaze with the only son who has preferred to live his life away from his father's aegis. Cory "Kaisey" Sutton is the co-star in this series. In fact, he is the main protagonist of the plot, with the young man who finds himself between the anvil and the hammer represented by the call of that family now far away and abandoned years before and that adoptive family represented by the indigenous tribe that welcomed him and who would like to use him to mock his father John.
Directing and conceiving all this is Taylor Sheridan, a great author who in recent years has delighted us with little gems such as Hell or High Water as author and director and Sicario as scriptwriter.
Sheridan is also known to serial fans for his role in the series of dazzling beauty that was Sons Of Anarchy. Although they deal with very different themes and have styles and tones light years away, the two series seem to be united by a search for the tragic and unavoidable fate and life of those who, despite themselves, are faced with a struggle for preservation and survival.
In the first episodes of Yellowstone, in fact, there is a clear intention to stage a dramatic choral tale that leads the protagonists to a hell never imagined and that no one would hope to face.
The series presents itself as a modern western, as a long film that perhaps John Ford would have shot like this nowadays. There are rodeos, wild horses, metropolitan cowboys and feuds for a piece of land or cattle, all in a breathtaking landscape setting.
In the serial world we notice some influence of the other Western Metropolitan of these years, that Justified by too many forgotten and surely that desire to build its own mythology that we can find in the great classics of these years as Westworld for settings and The Sopranos for chorality and depth.
If it is true that a swallow does not make spring in Yellowstone seems to have come summer with swallows and fauna of all kinds to wake us up from the torpor and give us a series with a capital S, where and when nobody expected it.