Trivia / Yellowstone

• Adored by the Network: Peacock, which carries the series' US streaming rights, has made no secret of that fact, not only including it in ads for the service but even tailoring many ads specifically around their carriage of Yellowstone. This is especially notable given that Yellowstone is not an NBCUniversal-owned series; Yellowstone ended up displacing The Office as Peacock's flagship piece of licensed content. It reached the point where executives at Paramount Global expressed regret for selling the rights to Peacock, leaving it unavailable for Paramount+, where the spinoff series 1883 airs; the FAQ section on Paramount+ even includes an explanation for why Yellowstone is not available on that platform. It's heavily speculated that the announcement of the new Sequel Series is a Loophole Abuse on the part of NBCUniversal with the intent of having the show continue on Paramount+ while being a sequel In Name Only.
• California Doubling: Although the show is set in Montana, the first three seasons were mostly filmed in Utah. In 2020 the show moved filming locations to Montana.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • Ryan Bingham, who plays Walker, is also a seasoned singer-songwriter. The show features several sequences where the plot will stop cold so that Walker can perform a song on his signature acoustic guitar, usually for the other members of the bunkhouse.
  • Descended Creator Taylor Sheridan gets a sequence in which his character shows off his cutting skills. Over the next few episodes, we're given numerous montages of various other characters cutting.
• The Danza: Martin Sensmeier as Monica's physical therapist, Martin.
• Descended Creator: Series co-creator and writer Taylor Sheridan portrays recurring horsetrader Travis Wheatley, who makes appearances in seasons one, two and four.
• Fake American: English actress Kelly Reilly plays American Beth Dutton.
• Fake Nationality: The fully Native American character of Monica is played by the mixed-race actress Kelsey Chow, who claims to have Eastern Band Cherokee ancestry on her mother's side. However, that tribe does not recognize her as a member because membership requires descent from ancestors who were formally enrolled in the tribe's records. Just having blood descent isn't enough. This caused a lot of controversy and discussion at the time of her casting.
• Hostility on the Set: While reports of tension between Kevin Costner and Taylor Sheridan go back to the very start of the show, they burst open in season five and turned it into a Troubled Production. On Costner's end, he brought his famed ego to the production and used the show's success as leverage for considerable demands in both his pay and his schedule, and when he caught COVID during production of season five, he counted his time in quarantine as part of his shoot days and left before all of his scenes were shot. Sheridan, meanwhile, grew overburdened working on too many projects at once and started turning in scripts late, while also butting heads with Costner over the show's creative direction and allegedly telling him to "stick to acting" in response to his concerns (even though Costner, like Sheridan, was an executive producer on the show). The final straw, apparently, was when Costner demanded that he get to veto plot elements he disagreed with. This hostility was presumably part (see Adored by the Network) of the reason why Season 5 was eventually announced to be the show's last with a new sequel series following it containing several actors of the original...but not Costner.
• In Memoriam: Several episodes in the fourth season end with one of these credits, particularly for famed Texan rancher Buster Welch and Wilford Brimley.
• Production Posse: Taylor Sheridan had previously cast Kelsey Chow and Martin Sensmeier in Wind River. Meanwhile, Yellowstone makes this the third stint for Gil Birmingham, who worked with Sheridan on Hell or High Water and Wind River.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting: Josh Lucas resembles a young Kevin Costner quite strongly and absolutely nails his signature deep raspy voice.
• Sleeper Hit: The series debuted on the fledgling Paramount Network in 2018, to mixed reviews, and the ratings averaged at 2.24 million viewers for the first season. However, during a time when cable viewership was declining, Yellowstone was the rare show that saw its ratings increase with each passing season. In fact, the incredible performance of the 4th season convinced ViacomCBS to put its plans to retool the network as Paramount Movie Network on hold, even though the rest of their programming at that point had either been cancelled or shifted to another network.

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