Yellowstone will make its broadcast premiere on CBS this Sunday. The Kevin Costner-led cowboy drama is already a cable ratings juggernaut for Paramount Network, where it originally debuted in 2018, and was the most-watched scripted show on television. Could re-airings of the hit Western series, which has four-and-a-half seasons under its belt and is currently streaming on Peacock, attract a new audience?
Reruns of the popular one-hour drama were slotted into CBS’s fall schedule after it became apparent this would be an anything but typical broadcast season amid the ongoing actors and writers strikes. With the absence of new original content to fill its lineup, CBS scheduled Yellowstone rebroadcasts on Sunday nights following NFL games and 60 Minutes — typically high viewership drivers for the network. Though time will tell if success will come from Yellowstone airing on CBS, which is starting with the franchise’s first season, the pieces appear to be in place for a potential series resurgence.
What is Yellowstone about?
Yellowstone follows the Dutton family as they run the largest ranch in Montana, which comes with a whole slew of problems. Leading the charge is patriarch John Dutton III (Costner, who is also an executive producer), who along with his grown children, Beth (Kelly Reilly), Jamie (Wes Bentley) and Kayce (Luke Grimes), navigate intense family drama, plenty of land disputes and at times, their own mortality.
The series’s first episode features — cue a five-year spoiler alert — the violent death of a major family member, a catalyst for the unhinged shenanigans that ensue over the next four-plus seasons. Established early on is the Duttons’s long history of damaging family secrets and that they can’t help but make bad decisions at the worst times, usually at the expense of each other.
What did critics think at the time?
Yellowstone is widely considered a TV behemoth now, but it didn’t start out that way — averaging 2.8 million same-day viewers for the series premiere in June 2018 before ballooning to a record 12.1 million to the Season 5 premiere in November.
Critical response to Season 1 on Paramount Network was lukewarm at best, with a mediocre 56% score based on 52 critics’s reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. (That aggregate critics score improved as the series went on; Season 5 posted an 84% average.) Viewers were more forgiving, giving Yellowstone an average score of 86%.
At the time the show launched, NPR credited creator Taylor Sheridan for creating a visually lush “prestige television version of Dallas,” but wrote Costner’s John Dutton fell short of being a worthy successor to J.R. Ewing, noting “few characters here are particularly likable or compelling.” CNN called the modern-day Western “about as exciting as watching a zoning-commision meeting.” But Vulture saw promise, writing that the first episode “offers plenty of reasons to be hopeful,” and that it’s cast and premise were its “biggest assets.”
Why is Yellowstone airing on CBS?
The short answer: the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. CBS and other broadcast networks were forced to pivot from their original fall plans when writers went on strike in May and actors joined them in July. Instead of promoting new seasons of NCIS and Ghosts or launching freshman shows like Elsbeth, a spin-off of Paramount+’s The Good Fight, the network is relying on a lineup that includes reality shows (the Josh Duhamel-hosted Buddy Games), scripted reruns (NCIS, FBI) and CBS debuts of repurposed properties (U.K.’s Ghosts, Australia’s NCIS: Sydney). Because CBS is a subsidiary of Paramount Global, which has Paramount Network in its vast portfolio, why not bring a proven success story like Yellowstone to fill a crucial spot?
“CBS is mostly doing this out of necessity,” Josef Adalian, West Coast editor of Vulture, told Yahoo Entertainment. “While the show has been widely seen, both on cable and via streaming on Peacock, there’s likely still an audience which has never seen the show because they either don’t have streaming or missed it when it first debuted on cable.” CBS traditionally holds a large piece of the viewership pie on Sundays thanks to the NFL and 60 Minutes, Adalian noted, and it could very well trickle down to Yellowstone: “Many of those older viewers might be interested in checking it out.”
The bar for success is also “a bit lower,” he explained, “because CBS isn’t replacing a scripted original with Yellowstone. It just needs to do better than reruns of a newer show CBS already owns would do.” Adalian forecasted that if 4 to 5 million viewers tune in each week to the Yellowstone reairings, “CBS will be happy.” “That’s 4 or 5 million viewers who might now opt to check out other seasons of the show or the Yellowstone prequels” 1883 and 1923, he said.
How different will the broadcast version of Yellowstone be?
If viewers decide to tune in CBS for Yellowstone, it won’t be the original version that aired on Paramount Network, which allows for more mature TV content. There likely won’t be as much profanity, nudity or violence — all aspects of Yellowstone that make it, well, Yellowstone.
Its episode lengths on cable were also fluid, running anywhere from 37 to 92 minutes. That will also have to be edited down to a broadcast-friendly length in some cases. (The series’s first episode will get a two-hour broadcast window — similar to when it aired on Paramount Network in 2018.)
“There will be cuts for language and for time,” Adalian explained, adding that even with tweaks, “the heart of the show – the storytelling – will remain mostly intact.” Plus, if people are interested, they can go to Peacock to watch unedited episodes.
Noel Murray, a freelance TV critic for the New York Times, says there may be people who prefer to consume the “sanitized versions” or who “really don’t like nudity or profanity or too much violence.”
“A CBS version of Yellowstone might hit the sweet spot for someone like that,” he told Yahoo Entertainment.
Could there be more moves like this in the future?
“A network like CBS will always prefer its own shows and original productions. But as budgets get tighter and networks have to make choices, there may be more plays like this,” Adalian said. “For the longest time, cable was powered by reruns of network TV shows. It’s not impossible that network TV could soon be partially given over to reruns of streaming services.”
Murray said that in times of uncertainty, unexpected opportunities arise. CBS is relying on football, supersized episodes of Survivor and The Amazing Race, and of course, Yellowstone.
NBC, meanwhile, is also betting on football with a healthy dose of scripted fare like Magnum P.I. and new drama The Irrational, as well Reba McEntire’s first season as a coach on The Voice.
Fox has its “Animation Domination” block along with a ton of reality on its slate, including the 10th cycle of The Masked Singer, while ABC is going big with The Golden Bachelor, featuring a 72-year-old widower, and the return of Dancing With the Stars to its airwaves.
“The one advantage to eras like this when we go through labor strife in the entertainment business is that people experiment with things,” Murray said. “Sometimes those experiments end up being interesting and paying off. Sometimes they’re just killing time.”
Yellowstone premieres Sunday at 8:30 p.m. ET on CBS.