This is what the Mountain West is like in 1923: The land is parched. The rain is locusts. The grass is straw. Cows and sheep go hungry. Automobiles line Main Street, but real men still ride horses. Old hostilities between the Irish and the British have recreated themselves in the new world. It is a hard year, but Jacob Dutton, played by Harrison Ford, has been here for 30 years and says he can’t remember an easy one. That Ford’s deeply creviced 80-year-old face looks carved from soapstone only underscores his claim.
There are plenty of reasons to panic, and yet the presence of a man called Dutton on this magnificent, hard-scrabble landscape puts me at ease. Series creator Taylor Sheridan has brought us all the way from contemporary Yellowstone to the year of that show’s first prequel, 1883, and now to 1923, to feel reassured. There was never a dawn in America without the Duttons.
In the opening few minutes, cowboy whisperer Sheridan throws it all at the screen unrestrained. I have Helen Mirren money! I have a budget for elephants! Oh, your show has a cute little crane shot? I’m filming these vistas off the side of a chopper! We out here in Tanzania! Welcome to prestige TV in the time of Yellowstone, baby!
Except 1923 doesn’t feel much like Yellowstone, a show I consider to be the most captivating trash on television. It shares that series’ wide open sky and indulgent one-liners; the opening sequence of 1923 feels reverse-engineered from the (entirely correct) notion that we all need to see Mirren spit, “What do you know about heaven?” with a shotgun in hand. But it also feels like 1923 — a series that’s rumored to last only two seasons — is going to be carefully acted, tightly drawn, real-quality TV.
So let’s start with the first kill, which in the world run by ruthless men, belongs to Helen Mirren as Jacob’s Irish bride, Cara. The kill shot would perhaps be unexpected from a homestead wife if it wasn’t unexpected in precisely the way we’ve come to expect from the women Sheridan writes: women who would make better cowboys than their partners if only they weren’t missing a critical appendage. Cara shoots a trespasser who’s looking to kill her, too. She doesn’t have a choice. The frontier credo is live and let live until it’s kill or be killed.
An atmospheric narrator — 1883 fans will recognize the voice of Elsa Dutton — does her mightiest to explain how the sprawling casts are interconnected. However, what the Duttons really need is a public Ancestry.com account. Here’s my best attempt at recreating the family tree:
After the death of Jacob Dutton’s brother, James (Tim McGraw in 1883), his sister-in-law Margaret (Faith Hill in 1883) asked Jacob to ride to Montana, where Margaret was eking out a life with her two sons. Jacob and his wife raised those boys, Spencer (Brandon Sklenar) and John (James Badge Dale), like their own. In 1923, they’ve already grown up. John is married to Emma (Marley Shelton), and their son Jack (Darren Mann) is set to marry their neighbor Elizabeth (Michelle Randolph). Jack and Elizabeth are the grandparents of ranching nepo baby John Dutton III (Kevin Costner on Yellowstone). I apologize in advance for any misinformation in the paragraph above. Someone will kindly sort me out in the comment section, I’m sure.
The important part, I think, is that it was not Jacob’s idea to travel West in reckless pursuit of riches. His empire-building is borne from fraternal duty and nobler because of it. Yellowstone fans know something of his type: A man who would die for the land because the land is metaphorically, inextricably linked to his blood.
The central conflict of 1923 so far is between the cattle ranchers, who are descended from the Irish, and Scottish sheepherders led by Banner Creighton (a very welcome Jerome Flynn, a.k.a. the rascal sellsword Bronn from Game of Thrones). The Duttons stay the same across the decades; it’s their enemies that change. Here, the locusts and drought have conspired to kill the grass, and the search for something green to feed the livestock has inadvertently pitted hard-working men against each other.
Jacob is the head of the Montana Livestock Commission, which means today he’s well positioned to punish his foes under the auspices of the law. Their crime? Illegally grazing their flock on another man’s land. It’s during the hearing that Jacob comes closest to espousing the philosophy of self-sufficiency that will be passed down among the Dutton sons like a family inheritance. He’s got no sympathy for the men who trespassed to save their sheep’s lives, which is tantamount to saving their own lives. “Bullies, bullies, bullies,” Jacob calls the desperate men. “Bullies whining about the consequences of the rules they broke.”
To be sure, Banner doesn’t have much love for the Duttons, either. “You’re no God,” he screams at Jacob like a man who’s never seen an episode of Yellowstone. Separately, Dutton and his ranching neighbors decide to band together to drive their cattle to grass at higher ground, where locusts are far from the most dangerous predator. The mountains belong to the wolves and the grizzlies.
Sheridan is so good at letting small decisions ripple across the water. An old man decides to move his herd to a higher altitude, and somewhere else on the range, a young woman is heartbroken. Jacob’s nephew Jack’s wedding will need to be postponed to accommodate the drive, and his bride, Elizabeth, tells him to go fuck a cow. It takes an intervention by sage and good Aunt Cara to smooth things over as she explains the fate of a cowboy’s wife to a woman about to take the plunge.
You don’t marry the man; you marry the life. And in this life, the needs of the cattle will always win. But in this life, Cara assures her, “You will be free in a way that most people cannot conceive.” I defer to her, of course, but I’d be lying if I said that right now I could conceive of the way these women, whose days are filled with mucking corrals and boiling potatoes, are inconceivably free. It doesn’t really matter, though. Elizabeth is hella horny for Jack, and soon they reconcile with a full mack sesh in plain view of their fathers. They’ll get married next week or the week after or whenever. On the range, Jacob tells Elizabeth’s irked and embarrassed pa, marriage is more of a formality anyway.
Given the depiction of Catholicism in 1923, it’s hard to see how a marriage blessed by the church would be more sacred for it. The always terrific Jennifer Ehle plays Sister Mary, a brutal Irish schoolmarm at a boarding school for Native American girls. She viciously raps the knuckles of a pupil who can’t recite the chemical recipe for soap, because even in the Roaring Twenties, students were being taught lessons they would absolutely never use. When the student, Teonnna — played by Blueberry standout Aminah Nieves — abandons English to defend herself in her first language, Sister Mary calls it filth and carts her off the headmaster’s office.
This is a mistake, methinks. Father Renaud (Sebastian Roché) makes Sister Mary look like a saint. He raps Mary’s knuckles for lack of compassion until it’s Teonna who cries for him to stop. But just when you might mistake Renaud for a reasonable and merciful ambassador of Christ, he whips the backs of Teonna’s legs for her part in disturbing his afternoon. When we glimpse the full extent of her injuries during the degrading group bathing the girls are subjected to, she’s still bleeding from her thighs. Sister Mary, a terror to the end, tells her to mop it up while her classmates sing “My Country Tis of Thee.” How’s that for a music cue?
At night, though, the girls whisper between their cots about what happens to them next. As horrific as school may be, they never hear from the graduates who promise to write. Do the nuns hide the letters? Or is whatever lies on the other side so bad that no letters ever arrive?
Montana is just one of 1923’s two theaters. In Africa, Jacob’s nephew Spencer is something of an assassin — the guy you send for when the big five come threatening your land. He and two African colleagues travel via Nairobi to a five-star safari lodge where they’ve been summoned to hunt a leopard. Deadeye Dutton still has night terrors from his time in the Great War’s terrible trenches, but Spencer’s solution — risking his life in the bush — has brought him closer to home than perhaps he realizes. Here, the grizzlies are lions and rhinos. The herd he’s protecting is wealthy holidaymakers.
It must be said that Spencer does the work with a great deal of flair, including using the men he works with as human bait. Sadly, the leopard opts to snack on a knockout newlywed who was ostentatiously flirting with Spencer at dinner just a few hours ago. Spencer’s bullet hits the leopard, but not before it kills the guest and not so quick that Spencer’s ready for what comes at him next. It’s another leopard. How lethal and also how strange! Aren’t leopards solitary big cats, you might be asking yourself? Well, stop. Leopards are whatever Taylor Sheridan tells you they are.
We don’t find out in this episode if Spencer survives the attack, but for the Dutton family, sacrifice often comes in the form of a favorite offspring. John Dutton loses a son in the Yellowstone series premiere; James Dutton loses a daughter in the 1883 season-one finale. That Cora writes Spencer a plaintive letter wishing for his homecoming feels decidedly foreboding.
But Spencer’s is not the only life hanging in the balance at the end of the series premiere. The war in Europe is won; closer to home, a range war is imminent. Banner and his men have cut Jacob’s fences so they can graze their sheep on the same high lands where the Duttons are currently driving their cattle. These dusky scenes of men moving their animals slowly up the mountain at night are among the most striking and well-lit I’ve seen on TV lately — ominously dark, and yet the action is completely intelligible. It can be done!
The Duttons know to be on the lookout for grizzlies, but — we were fools not to guess it! — man poses the greatest threat. When young Jack reaches the plateau and looks out at the grass, already wrecked by the mob of sheep, his eyes grow despondent before they take on the bewilderment of panic. A shot is fired in his direction, and we don’t learn who or what it hits. You might be thinking that Jack cannot die. Without Jack, there’s no John Dutton II, and without John Dutton II, there’s no John Dutton III, a.k.a. Kevin Costner. Then again, as Jacob assures his neighbor while their unwed kids make out in front of them — marriage is a piece of paper. It’s plain rude to interrogate the math between a man’s wedding anniversary and the birthday of his firstborn.
Perhaps Jack and Spencer both survive. Or maybe neither man ever comes home. For now, it seems impossible to understand the series we’re about to watch — to appreciate its tone and worldview — until we know just how many sons it’s prepared to sacrifice.
