Movies & TV

I haven't seen Yellowstone, but I saw it's spinoff 1883, which felt generally liberal in its treatment of native people, sympathetic, but doomed. Pretty standard these days, but they make hay about getting actual tribal input on their depiction. Im not qualified to say how well they did. The Duttons were generally open-minded about native people without feeling out of time and place, but the deuteragonists came in the form of Pinkertons, whose worst crimes as a group were left unmentioned. Both of these characters were sorta dicks, but in a way that was useful for their journey. I really appreciated the black Pinkerton, who got to have a lot of agency here in a believable way. This show was surprisingly multicultural, and generally sympathetic, but I felt like it was least friendly to the german (I think Romani?) immigrants in the caravan. Even so, I enjoyed this show. Pretty good as far as westerns go.

1923, the most recent show in the series, is a shitshow. The show start out with the Dutton patriarch attempting murder on Irish shepherds and almost dying for it, and he's generally the hyperest of chuds and a raging asshole. Definitely a believable character, but not somebody I could root for. There's a whole side-story of another Dutton being a big game hunter in Africa, and the show sanitizes this by having him focusing on the rare ones that hunt humans. Later, we get a wealthy villain who makes the Dutton patriarch look like a boy scout by comparison, but his depiction starts to fall into the Game of Thrones trap by focusing way too hard on his sexual proclivities as a sadist. Unlike 1883, the women weren't given enough to do in this show. I won't be watching season 2 of this slop.

And from the spunds of it, Yellowstone is no good either.