Of course Yellowstone was sensationalized, otherwise what would a show about Montana be about, new squeegee at the gas station? Neighbor’s cow ate an old spinster’s petunias?
You are over simplifying,, @thecarpathian , there actually was and I am sure still is some drama that did and does occur in Montana from time to time that some might find interesting. I truly believe that with some (’some’ is the operative word) poetic license a more realistic drama could be presented that would capture the actual spirit and culture of the people that work with the animals and the land and could also capture the interest of viewers without constantly presenting dealings with corrupt law enforcement officers, ongoing conflict with land developers, murders and gun battles with fully automatic weapons on a weekly basis, rattlesnakes whose venom kills their victims within minutes, bad asses that are so incredibly bad they cannot be stopped let alone killed, countless bodies being routinely disposed of into the same ravine off of the side of a road leading into Yellowstone National Park without drawing attention of law enforcement as they decomposed and attracted scavengers . . . and so on and so on and so on.
I will concede that as an actor Kevin Costner was able to realistically portray a hard bitten aging rancher who had lived a life that included suffering in bad weather and uncertain economic conditions to get beef on the market, and the rigors of that life alone could have been an interesting story . . . his ability to act was wasted on the script that was full of executions and what not that were ordered on his behalf. I will also give Cole Hauser some credit for his portrayal of a sociopath who would just as soon get into a fight than have sex with a woman, because to a certain extent his portrayal did remind me of a couple of people I knew of who made a living on the range with that apparent mindset and that were people that I certainly would never mess with, but at least one of them wound up doing time in Deer Lodge (and to be clear, except for six short months from ’84 through some of ’85, I make no claims to have ever worked on a farm or ranch and I was absolutely never ever a bad ass) so I will give him that much credit up to the point he started executing people (once with what must have been the world’s most deadly rattle snake) and winning unwinnable fights on an almost weekly basis.
As far as the six months I referred to that I spent on a wheat farm on the plains of north central Montana, I learned some interesting things about some people (infidelity, drugs, premature death) out there that I am going to choose to not elaborate on, because as I typed previously, it is a small world and so on and so on, so out of respect for some who I know are deceased and some who may not be, I’ll leave the detail alone. As I think back on the town that I actually grew up in (the wheat farm I worked on was about a hundred miles east of that) of about between three to five thousand, depending on the year, and one stop light and at least twelve bars (that were frequented by drifters, custom combiners, ranch hands and farmers, oil rig rough necks) I remember an attempted murder/suicide (the suicide was successful) that happened in broad daylight right outside the county courthouse (this was the spring the World’s Fair was in Spokane) and was what happened when a love affair went bad. I wasn’t there the night that in the grocery store parking lot when in the course of a disagreement someone pulled a .410 out of their pickup and pointed it at one of the brothers of the survivor of the murder (attempt)/suicide that I referred to, and the other brother was wound so tight because his sister was nearly shot to death that the standoff that occurred resulted in the .410 being broken over a knee but I did hear some reliable first hand accounts . . . I remember after I graduated HS a suicide with a 30-06 (that I was told basically took the top of his head off) at a keg party (that I wasn’t at) that involved a boy who became a man too soon and by all accounts was another episode of love gone wrong . . . I remember talk of a local ranch hand who rode herd on a ranch just west of town off of US 2 who never went anywhere without his 30-30 being as close as he could get away with keeping it because of an ongoing disagreement he had with a ranch owner, and she happened to be his boss. After I joined the Air Force and escaped my hometown I remember hearing the story, and my mom sent me the newspaper articles, of an abduction in 1979 of one of my classmates from a hotel, where she was the night clerk, on main street of that town . . . that story ended with her murder in a coulee not far from the river outside of that town, and the apprehension of the mentally ill individual who abducted and murdered her . . . and I just now did a google, and unlike the 1975 murderer (who I referenced in an earlier post) in Conrad who was executed in ’95, this one was paroled under "strict supervision" in ’08. . . . And as I was doing that search, I found another story (KRTV mtn news), more recent, (June 8, 2024), again in my hometown, involving a man who ran over a town cop in the parking lot of a bar I remember well, and then died after the cop shot him.
And I truly think, that against a backdrop of real life small towns and prairie where the wind never seems to quit blowing and coulees and ridges and rural blight on reservations and alcoholism, with some poetic license all of this, the murder the suicide the revenge, could be made interesting for the viewer and there would be no need for the poetic license to go full batcrap Yellowstone crazy because this stuff was and is real with real people.
But I will also concede that judging from the success of Yellowstone, I am in the clear minority here, but you will never change my opinion of that mind blowingly unreal and stupid series.