Yellowstone, Not Succession, is the Real Trump Allegory

by Ryan Scott

Two modern soap operas about rich, entitled families are coming back for Season 2 in June.  Succession was the popular and critical darling, with great performances, witty banter, and permanently cranked to eleven.  It’s basically a Murdoch family allegory – rich dysfunctional New York business elites – but there are enough Trump parallels available that many have tried to make the connection.

In doing so, they missed the real Trump series, probably because Yellowstone is dressed up in cowboy hats and lost in the woods of Montana (and on the Paramount network, which, people promise me, is a real thing).

Yes, it skews more melodramatic and slightly less believable, but the visuals are stunning and it’s written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, the writer of Sicario and Hell or High Water (and the writer-director of Wind River, my favorite movie of 2017).  It’s no slouch.

Oh yeah, and it stars Kevin Costner.

Costner plays a Montana rancher who basically runs the state and battles with everyone from politicians to environmentalists to local native tribes to fortify and expand the cattle empire his family has controlled for 132 years.  Yellowstone, in many ways, is Succession transplanted to the modern West, but it’s not about greed – the key element in Succession – Yellowstone is about loyalty, and that’s why it’s the true Trump allegory on TV.

I just can’t imagine the Trump kids ever letting personal ambition outweigh family the way Succession’s Roys do.  Yellowstone’s Duttons have their own share of infighting and backstabbing, but it’s in service of the family, even if they don’t always agree on what loyalty means.

The siblings on Succession genuinely seem to want to love each other, but they’ve been raised in such a competitive environment it’s not clear they could even know exactly what that means.  The general public wants to put that kind of emotional distance on the Trump family, but Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka don’t ever seem to be competing for anything other than their father’s affection, which describes the Duttons to a T.

Costner’s John Dutton invites few outsiders into the family’s inner circle.  When he does, they’re desperate men with few options.  They get branded, literally, and receive a higher status and more responsibility than the other ranch hands.

In one scene, a newly branded man explains he’s not willing to break the law (which, it turns out, is the only real duty of the branded men), the foreman replies that the brand means trust, specifically, “that we trust you to do what we tell you.”  The man replies, “That’s not what that word means.”

It’s all eerily reminiscent of Jim Comey’s account of the famous Trump dinner shortly after the election.  The President kept asking for loyalty and Comey kept promising loyalty to the country, as it became increasingly clear Trump wanted something else.  The Trump administration’s personnel moves in the years since couldn’t have been more in line with the “branded men” concept if they’d been written by Sheridan himself.

There’s also a scene where Dutton tries to convince his Native American daughter-in-law to leave her position as teacher on her reservation to take a more lucrative position that would benefit the family.  She resists because of the need she’s meeting for her tribe.  Dutton says, “To consider other families before my own is to fail them as a father.”  That line is certainly more eloquent than anything Trump’s ever said, but you see the concept under everything he does.

Survival, self-reliance, us vs them – a literal conserving of past systems and values – make the characters on Yellowstone, while conniving and troubled, more representative of the actual dichotomy at play in the US.

On Succession, the characters are greedy and they’re entertaining, but they’re not real or relatable.  Yellowstone’s characters struggle to balance the very things that make Trump both attractive and abhorrent.  They’re desperate for security and stability, but they pursue it through force and manipulation with their own well-being as the center of their moral compass.

The shows are very similar, but it is those few key differences that make Yellowstone a prescient look into the battle for the nation’s soul from a perspective sorely underrepresented in popular entertainment and Succession merely an emotional romp through the torrid lives of seemingly aspirational people.

That doesn’t make one more worthy than the other, just different.  Succession is probably the better artistic product and it’s maybe a little more fun, certainly deserving of all the attention and praise heaped upon it.  I just don’t want us to forget about Yellowstone, which is campy and crazy and a lot of fun on its own (even if just for the Montana nature-porn).

Yellowstone has also tapped into something a little deeper, an extension of the themes that run through all of Sheridan’s work and are becoming more relevant as we gear up for another election.  It deserves more attention than it got in season 1 and is certainly worth a look, even if it isn’t the modern media darling Succession turned out to be.