For years, Kevin Costner’s exit from “Yellowstone” has been treated like the dramatic end of a messy off-screen standoff. According to Taylor Sheridan, however, Costner’s departure was not supposed to be a sudden, late-breaking creative crisis. It was part of the plan from the beginning.
Speaking on “The Bill Simmons Podcast,” Sheridan said Costner was only meant to anchor the hit Paramount series for its first three seasons, with the show then shifting toward the next generation of Duttons.
“With ‘Yellowstone,’ Kevin was only supposed to be in the first three seasons,” Sheridan said. “That was in his contract. In my mind, that’s when his youngest son takes over. And then we have to watch this and lose that ranch over, you know, or not lose the ranch, whatever the case is going to be. But the network was so scared of not having Kevin be a part of it.”
That fear, Sheridan said, came from the size of the show. “Yellowstone” had become a behemoth for Paramount, and the idea of moving on from Costner while the series was still growing was not something the network was eager to embrace.
“Even though Kevin was ready, he was ready to go,” Sheridan said. “He had other things he wanted to do, but he stayed on for another two seasons. And that was just because the show was such a behemoth. It was such a huge hit that the notion of giving up a hit before it had run out of juice to squeeze is very foreign to a network.”
Sheridan also said there was outside business pressure to keep “Yellowstone” going, including from cable companies that wanted guaranteed future seasons as part of their own deals.
“There was even pressure from some of the cable companies wanting to put it in their deals that they were going to get an X number of seasons of ‘Yellowstone’ to re-up with whatever this cable company is,” he said. “I mean, that’s the power of a really big hit show. But creatively, that can run in opposition.”
That is the more revealing part of Sheridan’s answer. The Costner situation was not just a scheduling dispute or a star leaving a franchise. Sheridan is effectively saying the show’s original creative structure was bent around the commercial reality of a massive hit.
“And finally, Kevin hit a point where he’s like, ‘I gotta go do my own thing,’” Sheridan said. “I gotta do my own thing, too. But we had originally conceived it together that it was three seasons and then the baton is handed. Or if that wouldn’t have been better for the show. Because we had to tread water for a bit there. I think it was pretty evident.”
That is a frank admission, though it is also a somewhat diplomatic version of how the Costner exit actually played out. Yes, Costner had wanted to leave “Yellowstone,” and yes, Sheridan says the two of them had originally conceived the series as a three-season handoff. But the actor’s eventual departure was hardly the clean baton pass Sheridan describes. Costner’s John Dutton was killed off at the beginning of Season 5B, entirely off-screen, and Costner did not appear in the final episodes at all.
That is a very different thing from a proper send-off. Costner had previously suggested he was open to returning under the right circumstances, but the well-publicized friction between him, Sheridan, and Paramount came to a head as Costner shifted his attention to his Western epic “Horizon: An American Saga.” The first film struggled at the box office, and the already-completed second chapter still has no release date, leaving one of the stranger afterimages of the whole “Yellowstone” mess: Costner left television’s biggest drama for a passion project that has, at least for now, stalled after one theatrical release.
Sheridan has often talked about knowing where his stories are going, and he made that point again on Simmons’ podcast. “I know where every show ends. I know how they all end,” he said, adding that most won’t go for more than five years. “And I think you have to know how they end. Or if you don’t, how do you know where you’re going?”
In this case, the ending apparently changed because the show became too big to let go of its biggest star on schedule. Whether “Yellowstone” would have been better off handing the baton to Kayce Dutton after Season 3 is impossible to know now, but Sheridan no longer sounds especially convinced that the extra Costner years helped the series creatively. And given how abruptly John Dutton was ultimately dispatched, it is hard not to wonder whether the show missed its best window for the cleaner exit Sheridan says was there all along.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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