Chris Bryant | On 03, Feb 2023

Following the huge success of Yellowstone, and prequel series 1883, Paramount and Taylor Sheridan have teamed up once more to produce another entry in the Dutton family history, this time centred on the era of Jacob (Harrison Ford) and his wife, Cara (Helen Mirren), as they take possession of the Yellowstone ranch.

As Dutton tradition would dictate, Harrison Ford’s patriarch has few emotions and fewer facial expressions, his dialogue leaning predictably towards flippant retorts and stories about his father over anything of substance. Mirren’s matriarch follows suit, a Great Depression-era Beth Dutton who doesn’t care for horses but fiercely defends the family unit. While the roles are expensively overcast, they fit the Yellowstone playbook, but it’s once you look past the big names that 1923 really begins to disappoint.

Brandon Sklenar’s Spencer Dutton – Jacobs oldest son, working in Africa as a hunter after the war – is the epitome of 1923’s attitude. A walking moustache who is fuelled solely by a diet of whiskey and cigarettes, and finds adoration from ultra-skinny white women for his thousand yard-stare and dislike for talking about his WWI experiences. Luckily, Sheridan has written in Alexandria (Julia Shlaepfer), a genuinely sickening character whose purpose is to fawn over Spencer at every turn, have no thoughts of her own, and to inevitably undress and marry him.

Aminah Nieves co-stars as Teonna Rainwater, presumably a relation to Yellowstone’s Thomas Rainwater – whose use of capitalism to reclaim Native American land provides one of the best story arcs in the original show. No such luck for Teonna, who gets minimal screen time and spends it almost exclusively being tortured. While a realistic portrait of Native American treatment is perhaps fair, dipping back to see a defenceless, but defiant, Teonna enduring a different method of torture each episode is not the representation win 1923 seems to think it is.

Therein lies the major problem with 1923. Yellowstone, for a while anyway, managed to portray a masculine American fantasy in which billionaire cowboys really are the good guys, and are even supported by Native American chiefs, opposing landowners, and local government. Birmingham, Costner and Co, had all the freedom to conduct their business in a political setting, and their grudges in the vast lands they owned. 1923 isn’t given that opportunity – for the most part, it’s ruthless gang warfare surrounding whose sheep live where. There’s no modern political system to navigate, no array of interesting personalities to cause and contribute to the family drama, no cultural divides to adjust to, no big bad construction corporation to overcome; simply two groups of angry men brutally murdering each other over cows.

Coming in at a jaw-dropping $22 million an episode, by Sheridan’s account, viewers may – and should – want more from 1923. More than Hollywood stars in shallow roles, more than the tired dialogue that borders on satire, more than the most basic male power fantasy, more in every category. Instead, 1923 ends up as a shallow, simplified prequel with a much bigger wallet.

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