A new trailer for Paramount Network’s Yellowstone delivers many more details about its story, and offers glimpses at the impressive cast that’s been assembled. The series is banking on the casting of Kevin Costner in the lead role, but as the new trailer demonstrates it also boasts a lineup of character actors, like Danny Huston, Kelly Reilly, Wes Bently, Cole Hauser, Gretchen Mol, and Jill Hennessey.
A modern-day Western crossed with Dallas, Yellowstone has all the makings of a primetime soap opera with all the benefits of being pre-packaged as prestige television. That is in addition to the series being written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, who has become something of a commodity in recent years thanks to the praise handed to films he’s written, like Sicario, Hell or High Water, and his directorial debut, Wind River. And, coming at the start of summer, the series might prove to be as big a hit as Paramount Network is likely hoping, since there won’t be many series that can compete with it in terms of sheer star power.
More: Billions Renewed For Season 4 At Showtime
While the new trailer reveals more about the story and the challenges facing Costner's John Dutton and his family, it’s still a little challenging to pare down the series’ conceit while trying to sell it as the same. If you weren’t exactly sure whether or not the Duttons were who you were supposed to root for, well, that’s certainly intentional, as the series is clearly neck deep in the morally gray waters Sheridan is so fond of wading in. Check out the official synopsis for more details:
“Yellowstone stars world-renowned actor and Oscar®-winner Kevin Costner, who serves in the lead role, and is written and directed by critically-acclaimed, Oscar®-nominated screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (“Hell or High Water” and “Sicario,”). Costner stars as John Dutton, who controls the largest contiguous ranch in the United States, under constant attack by those it borders — land developers, an Indian reservation, and America’s first National Park. It is an intense study of a violent world far from media scrutiny — where land grabs make developers billions, and politicians are bought and sold by the world’s largest oil and lumber corporations. Where drinking water poisoned by fracking wells and unsolved murders are not news: they are a consequence of living in the new frontier. It is the best and worst of America seen through the eyes of a family that represents both.”
Yellowstone is the first big series to premiere on Paramount Network since Waco, another star-studded reach for prestige television glory. The six-episode retelling of the deadly Texas siege starred Taylor Kitsch as a weirdly friendly David Koresh, and Michael Shannon as FBI negotiator Gary Noesner. The series was, by all accounts, successful enough, with the premiere earning moderately positive praise and ratings of over a million viewers.
Though it didn’t make Game of Thrones or Westworld-sized waves, it did kick the rebranding of Spike off on a positive note. Yellowstone, with its pedigree both in front of and behind the camera, looks poised to carry the newly christened Paramount Network into the foreseeable future.
Next: HBO’s Succession Trailer: Brian Cox Leads A Troubled Media Empire
Yellowstone premieres Sunday, June 20 @9pm on Paramount Network.