The “Yellowstone” TV show violates geographic scale

Compressing Montana’s vast landscapes betrays the show’s premise

A promotional poster for “Yellowstone.” How far is the capitol from the ranch, or the park?

The fictional world of the TV show “Yellowstone” is geographically compressed, compared to the vast real-world landscape it claims to inhabit. This shouldn’t matter; such compression is a valuable storytelling device common to many movies, shows, and books. But I find that it’s the greatest of my many objections to the show—because it diminishes characters’ relationships to the rugged, limitless nature that the show claims to be about.

Here is where I should provide some background on “Yellowstone,” perhaps starting with the phrase “If you’ve been living under a rock since 2018…” In fact I myself just watched the first season-and-a-half in the last few months. I don’t watch much TV. I did catch the show’s premiere in 2018, but couldn’t find a reason to keep paying attention to it. This past year, I found the reason: the show is a massive cultural phenomenon set in my region, and I needed to understand why.

So I’ve just learned: The Dutton Yellowstone Ranch is on the northern border of the national park, apparently in Montana’s Paradise Valley. It faces development pressure from booming Bozeman. There are conflicts with a fictional adjacent Indian reservation. And lots of action at the state capitol in Helena.

I’m not here to complain about the farfetched plotting, the unrealistic depictions of ranching, the howlers in Indigenous characterizations, the administrator who straight-facedly intones, “The university is expanding its liberal arts program,” or other shortcuts that continually threaten my suspension of disbelief. These are creative choices that clearly work for millions of people, even if they don’t work for me.

And I will say that the big-picture choices do get a lot right: real-life old-time ranches do indeed have conflicts with developers, tribes, and governments, plus kids having different ideas and good help being hard to find. The fact that in this show, these conflicts end up playing out like an old-fashioned cowboy movie is a credit, not a detriment, to the showrunners’ storytelling skills.

Instead, I’m here to complain about the geography. I’ll try to be brief:

1. Any ranch bordering the park would be at least an hour’s wearying drive from Bozeman, though here it’s depicted as a mom’s easy commute to the university.

2. Bozeman to Helena is another 90 minutes’ drive through sprawling suburbs, endless wheatfields, rivers’ headwaters, and self-contained small towns, but characters pop back and forth from the capitol to the ranch before lunch.

3. The reservation must also be located quite near the park, and thus its dry climate (“elevation 2890”) and lack of economic opportunity make little sense.

4. The metaphoric “train station,” on a road so little used that nobody would wonder what a bunch of animals were scavenging down there, is just across the Wyoming border, but somehow not in the park?

5. I’m sure there are countless other examples beyond the 12 episodes that I watched. (Feel free to list them in the comments!)

Note that my problem is not the filming locations—a ranch 210 miles west of Bozeman, a reservation 200 miles east, and dozens of spots in Utah. Filmmakers always have diverse locations stand in for landscapes, just as diverse actors stand in for characters. Rather, my objection is to the fundamentals of the fictional world that the show has constructed. In that world, it’s easy to drive across Montana, the state capital feels integrated with far-flung locations, and profoundly different ecosystems and economic systems butt up against each other in incongruous perfection.

What has most impressed me about 35 years of living in Montana is how it just takes so damn long to get anywhere. It’s not just that the snow-capped peaks extend on forever—it’s that your destination is on the other side of them. The Crow Reservation feels like a totally different world from Bozeman, several hours away—because it is. Bozeman’s urban trendiness is notable because it is indeed such a contrast with remote life on a genuine working ranch. Helena politicians make decisions with unfortunate effects on rural ranches and communities because the capital city with its Gilded Age mansions is indeed so foreign to most of the state. And old ranchers’ medical conditions are simultaneously dramatic and exhaustingly mundane because it’s so far to both the emergency room and all the follow-up appointments.

What makes Montana special is its immense scale, along with its resulting geographic diversity. Montana contains lots of different ecosystems because it is indeed such a gigantic state. The national park feels different from a city park because it’s a daylong or weeklong trip rather than a lunchtime diversion. By compressing and distorting this geographic reality, the show sacrifices an opportunity to show its characters engaging with the environment around them.

The show I would have enjoyed watching was one where the characters’ everyday decisions faced this vastness. Because the vastness comes from majestic, elemental nature, and that nature is what has long defined Montana.

The showrunners—perhaps wisely—didn’t want to make that show. They made a show with beautiful scenic natural backdrops, but they weren’t interested in their characters’ relationships to Yellowstone or nature or even ranching. They were interested in family and money, power and obligation. “Yellowstone” thus has less to do with Montana than it does with virtually every other show in the history of television.

That makes it good television. But the reason I turned it off after one episode in 2018 was that I was hoping it would be good television about Montana. And it wasn’t. My rewatch over the past months didn’t change my mind, but it did focus my objections. Yellowstone violates geographic scale—and it’s geographic scale that makes Montana, that makes Yellowstone, that makes an authentic natural story.