Kevin Costner’s gone, but Yellowstone is moving forward – just in a slightly different direction with a new spin-off series. More here.
This coming weekend sees the season finale of Yellowstone season five. This is the run of the show that started with Kevin Costner in the lead role for its first half, only for him to not return for its second. There’s been a lot of to and fro as to why that is, but as I’ve been chatting about in my reviews of the show, it’s had to do a fair amount of work to account for the absence of its leading man.
There’d been speculation though that things were building towards a Yellowstone season 6 to continue the main line of the show. However, things are taking a slightly different turn.
It’s being reported that we are sort of getting a season 6, but it’s going to be in the form of a spin-off series instead. It’ll have a slightly different title, and both Keilly Reilly and Cole Hauser – Beth and Rip – have apparently inked deals to lead the show. Several of the cast from the main series are likely to return. Taylor Sheridan, the creator of Yellowstone, is overseeing the new show.
The reason things are going that way? As things stand, a legacy deal means that the main Yellowstone show is streaming on Peacock in the US. Paramount Global wants it on the Paramount+ streaming service instead (a service that wasn’t operating all the way back when Yellowstone started), and the way to do that is to treat it as a brand new programme. New name, new title sequence, new theme tune. That sort of stuff.
It does mean that while this weekend sees the episode that effectively ends the main Yellowstone show, we can expect narrative threads to be picked up in whatever the next iteration of the programme is called. It is expected to have Yellowstone in its title, though.
More as we hear it. And expect fireworks aplenty over the weekend, as season five comes to an end…
