Double TV blog this week, because 1923 also wrapped up Sunday night. A prequel of Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone set two generations before, the show is pretty much running the same playbook Yellowstone ran: They’re taking our land! About 15 episodes across two seasons, it’s about the Dutton family fighting off businessmen who are jeopardizing their way of life.  I’ll skip some recap; the premise is the Dutton family doing everything they can to survive until their war hero nephew Spencer comes home to defend them. Harrison Ford is awesome as Jacob Dutton, the patriarch of the family, as is Helen Mirren who plays his wife.

There’s a dozen hours detailing Spencer and his wife Alex’s journey to America, and the other half of the show is just past tense Yellowstone plots. I thoroughly enjoyed the show, and I love Sheridan’s cinematography. It’s high drama and quite brutal at times. The show ends with Spencer’s wife dying during childbirth, and Spencer reclaiming the ranch and planting to the Dutton flag for the next hundred years. Also, I couldn’t help but laugh as the two houses fight for hours, and Spencer just walks up and kills 10 people in 10 seconds. My immersion was broken!

I want to specify that I did like this show. I watched every Sunday and looked forward to it, the series finale was good closure and was a lot of fun. WITH THAT BEING SAID, I have no idea what happened to Taylor Sheridan. He’s so much better than writing western soap operas, yet that seems to be all he’s doing now. He was the gold standard of neo-western directors 5 years ago. He wrote or directed Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River before hitting a dud with Those Who Wish Me Dead. Since then, Yellowstone exploded in popularity, and he got a dozen other shows greenlit on Paramount Plus.

There’s a lot of criticism about his writing of female characters, I can’t really disagree. Both wives of the Dutton boys pretty much just got tortured for two seasons before meeting sad demises. The villain straight up had sex slaves that we had to watch get beaten repeatedly. I don’t know, he wrote a whole episode on the last season of Yellowstone about how he’s the man who lives on a ranch with dozens of models. He also bought a ranch to pretend to be his character on Yellowstone, maybe he’s writing all this slop to pay the bills on that.

I enjoyed 1923 but thought it was a step below 1883 and Yellowstone. I hope Taylor Sharidan doesn’t stop writing these stories, the cinematography alone is top tier and worth a watch. We really don’t have any good neo-western stuff coming out these days and it would be a shame to have the only guy doing them step back. The guy has an unlimited budget and is one of the best writers in Hollywood, we’ll see what he comes up with next. Make another movie!