
Oh, have I mentioned I’m ON STAYCATION?? Well I am! And so it seemed the perfect time to do a short-term subscription to SkyShowtime via Prime (3 months for 15€) to specifically watch Yellowstone because what the hell else am I doing this summer and I have been intrigued by this series for ages. Also this summer is all about doing what feels good. So done! First episode did not disappoint.
Ha! I am all about the escapist television drama these days (alternating with equally trivial reading). Not a fan of anything Western-inflected — everything was dismally glutted with it when I was growing up — but you know me and sci-fi, and I just took the plunge and subscribed to Britbox so that we could watch all the old Doctor Who episodes that I haven’t yet seen (those featuring Doctors Five, Six and Seven).
As we queued it up the Engineer told me about a docu-drama that aired over a decade ago about the launch of the Doctor Who series, and which I’d somehow missed, so I had to detour into that. I haven’t seen anything so profoundly affecting in a while, surprisingly enough. Things I learned:
And here we are over sixty years later, and people like me are still nerding out over the “little monster show.” It’s giving me a silly, more innocent world to escape to in the evenings.
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I still have never seen Dr Who… but you do realise that Star Wars was a total space age western?
Tbh Yellowstone feels like a prairie version of Succession.
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You do realize I have almost zero interest in Star Wars, right? I got a kick out of the first movie because it had terrific energy and sent up the ray-gun serials that were still repeating in some form on TV when I was knee-high, and I saw the second because a film freak friend was in town, and then the third was well, why not, but oh my god, what a stupid resolution. Completely ignored the revivals until I got hooked up with the Engineer, who wanted to see the third trilogy and therefore streamed the second for me, so while I’ve seen all the theatrical features because date night okay, I’ve… well, seen them and don’t care to revisit the universe. The premises are corny, the hero worship vaguely fascistic and the the streaming series that emerged recently could put Argus to sleep. (Seriously I CANNOT gag down one more minute of the Brave Resistance vs. The Myrmidon Storm Troopers.) There’s neither the thoughtful exploration of “what if science made it possible to do this, what would happen” of top flight sci fi or the unleashed, crazy plunge into “let’s just say there’s some way to fly through time and space so we can meet Sir Isaac Newton and visit Pompeii when it was standing, and use psychic paper to fool people and regenerate instead of dying and have a ‘sonic screwdriver’ that can do anything’ ” that makes Doctor Who such bullshit fun. (Also, Who asks some seriously difficult questions about ethical decisions and human connections, which is interesting when you consider how many of the characters aren’t human.)
Anyway it’s the mise-en-scene of Westerns, oh god more prairies and horses and cattle and unwashed guys and saloons and gunfights bla bla, and the tendency to oversimplify US history, that makes me sour on them.
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I love Yellowstone!
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And there are prequels too!
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One place I want to visit one day.
And after starting to watch the Series, I want to visit it even more now.
Really loving this show, unfortunately, my wife doesn’t agree 😱😭
Thank you for sharing.
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