The Yellowstone Costner-versy, Explained
Between issues surrounding Taylor Sheridan and Kevin Costner and more, we break down the controversy around Yellowstone season five.
On Friday, September 1, Kevin Costner stood across from his soon-to-be ex-wife in a courtroom battle for child support payments, both flanked by lawyers. It was a sad example of how a marriage of 18 years could unravel so quickly. Costner said to Fox News, “When you have a life that long with somebody, there is no winner.” There certainly were no winners when the Oscar-winning actor announced he would be leaving Yellowstone, either, and creator Taylor Sheridan was forced to end his series early.
Paramount+ will lose the show that made them actually competitive against Netflix, and millions of viewers will now have their favorite modern Western cut short, never mind the fact that they can’t even see the end of season five. It’s a problem that’s been stewing behind the scenes for a while, and we’re only now just learning why Costner decided to leave in the first place. But there’s more to it than just the loss of the show’s leading actor. The end of Yellowstone happens at the intersection of long-awaited dreams, broken hearts, and a fight between actors and directors.
You can watch our video essay of this article above.
Yellowstone and the Lone Wolf
For the first couple of seasons of Yellowstone, which was co-created with John Linson, Taylor Sheridan would share writing credits with the occasional co-writer, though he participated in writing every episode for the past few seasons. When Sheridan writes a script for Yellowstone, he goes up to his property in Wyoming and locks himself inside a tiny one room wooden building he calls a ‘cabinet.’ There he can isolate himself from the world and turn out scripts for Yellowstone and its many spin-offs. As The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Taylor Sheridan does whatever he wants.”
It’s unusual, since most writers in Hollywood work in groups or at the very least coordinate with other staff on the show, but Sheridan is a lone wolf. This individualism doesn’t stop at the door of his one-man writers room, either; Sheridan often sees it as necessary to maintain full creative control over his shows in order to see his vision through. The writer-director was once working on five shows at the same time: Yellowstone, its prequel series 1923 and 1883, the Sylvester Stallone-led Tulsa King, and the recently released Special Ops Lioness, along with executive producing the upcoming Lawmen: Bass Reeves.
Being so busy, his plan was to write the pilots for Tulsa King and Lioness, and then get a showrunner and writers room to create the rest of those shows. But in both cases, he ended up firing the writers and directors because of creative differences. He simply says that the writers room doesn’t work for him, but that lone wolf style doesn’t sit well with the WGA; part of why they were striking was for a minimum number of writers on every show, and it’s unclear how the post-strike contract will affect the Sheridan-verse.
Taylor Sheridan: God Complex or Creative Genius?
Sheridan’s uncompromising attitude has led him to push other Hollywood creatives aside in favor of just doing the work himself. It might seem like he simply has a good work ethic, but on set some people have started spreading rumors that he’s developed a full-blown God Complex. Kelly Reilly, who plays Yellowstone fan favorite, Beth Dutton, says that she butted heads with the show’s creator during season five. She thought Beth might be going in a different direction than was natural for her character. Speaking to Yahoo! in an interview, Reilly shared her mixed feelings:
“I’m coming to it almost the same as the audience. I mean, I have my hopes and thoughts for the character. Also, as I’ve played her for over five years now, I feel like I know her so well, but I’m still learning. There are still things that I read and I didn’t expect, or sometimes I wish for something else for her, but that’s the same as the audience. We’re all sort of beholden to the vision of the storyteller and we serve the story. Who knows what’s going to happen?”
Of course, other actors seem to think Sheridan is quite empathetic, given his early career as an actor. Julia Schlaepfer, who plays Alexandra in 1923, remembers Sheridan being quite a calming and supportive influence when she was auditioning for her role. She told The Hollywood Reporter that Sheridan said, “All I want you to do is be you. Drop any notion of the character you ever had because you, to me, are Alex. You have all the qualities of this character, so just be yourself. You can drop the accent if you want. I don’t care. I’m just going to read with you.”
The truth is, he seems to pick and choose which people he respects on set. In his aforementioned interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Sheridan said:
I don’t really give a sh*t what a line producer or some physical production person thinks. I care a lot about craft services and set decorators and assistant camera operators, and people that are working their asses off for way longer than I work. I work 16 to 18 hours a day. They’re doing it for $35 an hour. I really care what they think.
Taylor Sheridan Loses His John Dutton
Sheridan is a person who seems to respect hard work and tends to push aside anyone he sees as getting in his way. If an actor is just trying to do the best they can, he’ll help facilitate that. But if someone is trying to add their creative voice to the project, it will seemingly not go unpunished. So when Kevin Costner decided to leave the series, it was a big blow to Sheridan. Many believed that the two men were at each other’s throats, and more blamed Costner for Yellowstone‘s premature ending, but the situation turned out to be more complex than that, so much so that Costner might end up suing Paramount for trouble had with his departure.
As for Costner and Sheridan, the two men are adults and handled their disputes as such. Despite the rift that may be growing between them, Sheridan still respects Costner as an actor. Sheridan said in the same interview:
“His creation of John Dutton is symbolic and powerful … and I’ve never had an issue with Kevin that he and I couldn’t work out on the phone. But once lawyers get involved, then people don’t get to talk to each other and start saying things that aren’t true and attempt to shift blame based on how the press or public seem to be reacting. He took a lot of this on the chin and I don’t know that anyone deserves it. His movie seems to be a great priority to him and he wants to shift focus. I sure hope [the movie is] worth it — and that it’s a good one.”
He hinted to James Hubbard of The Hollywood Reporter that the character of John Dutton was never meant to make it to the end of the show, and has assured reporters numerous times that the series will wrap up the way it was supposed to from the beginning. At first, Costner was demonized for leaving; as indicated by Sheridan above, for a long time, people thought that the actor was simply getting out of Yellowstone to work on his own film, Horizon, a passion project of his that he’s been trying to get made for 35 years.
Kevin Costner Leaves Yellowstone for New Horizons
Costner said he was trying to keep both projects going, but had been crippled by constantly changing demands and the awkward schedule of Yellowstone, a schedule, by the way, that was not set by Sheridan but rather by the show’s producers. When it was decided that Yellowstone‘s fifth season would be split into two parts, Costner kept saying that he didn’t have enough time to work on that show twice a year while he was trying to produce his movie.
It would be easy to see how he and Sheridan could have fought over their own projects, but now we know there was a little more on his plate than just another Western. Costner’s wife, Christine Baumgartner, filed for divorce earlier this year. The two had long been estranged, but now Costner was caught up in a legal battle for property income and how often he would see his own children. Baumgartner had sued Costner to increase his child support payments to a monthly $161,592, and though the judge eventually ruled in his favor, the rest of us only recently found out.
Costner struggled through negotiations with Paramount to try and lessen his obligations for the show since now, along with making a movie, he was also dealing with a complicated divorce. The actor and the production studio were unable to come up with an agreement, and so Costner must have felt forced to leave the show just to deal with his own life. Paramount decided they would cancel Yellowstone instead of letting it continue, and Costner said he would probably have to sue Paramount over unresolved issues.
The mess might have come from Costner’s life. But none of it seems to be his fault, and Sheridan probably still respects Costner for that reason. Despite all the damage done by Costner leaving Yellowstone, he was just a hardworking actor trying his best to keep it together. Paramount probably doesn’t appreciate Costner’s exit either, but in a situation like this, the actor was right — there are no winners.
