ABSTRACT
Yellowstone (2018–2024) premiered on the Paramount Network in 2018 and has enjoyed notable success with audiences and critics alike. The show follows the Dutton family’s grapple with the shared borders of the fictitious Yellowstone Ranch. A neo-Western drama, the series foregrounds the intersected vested interests of the Duttons, land developers, the National Park Service, and a neighbouring Native American Reservation. Yellowstone is somewhat unique in that it is set almost entirely outdoors, with almost all its scenes taking place in nature. The show centres around romantic notions of land-use; specifically, the consequences of colonialisation and the territorial expansion in mainland North America during the American Frontier. In doing so, the show romanticises and promotes expansionist attitudes towards land, landscape and nature that reveal much about contemporary environmental value orientations within popular culture. Furthermore, the show prioritises and popularises the romantic notion of animals as subservient and, ultimately, valued in terms of their use to humans. The show represents human-animal-landscape relations as a hierarchy dictated by, and to the advantage of, humans. The show’s narrative focus on the battle between humans over land and animals ironically ignores the animal-landscape relationship which pre-exists the human invasion of the land. This chapter will examine the methods, means and impact of these creative choices and ask the central question: how and why does Yellowstone promote a problematic representation of human-animal-landscape relationships?
