Yellowstone, Righteous Gemstones signal a new obsession with TV empires

An proud patriarch who possesses a vast empire of power, influence and wealth, must face old age. None of his children seem up to the task, spoiled and warped as they are by their family’s excessive wealth. All involved are doomed by petty grudges, delusions about grandeur and familial obligations.

Pop Quiz – Which series describes this premise?

1. Yellowstone
2. The Righteous Gemstones
3. Succession
4. Promised Land

Trick question: The answer is “all of the above.” Something distinct about waning empires is brewing in the American TV zeitgeist right now, and has been for quite some time. You could trace this back to Bush’s mocking of the 1 percent in Arrested DevelopmentOr even the soapy adventures of an older series such as Dallas And Dynasty. But today’s TV about falling families all seem of a piece while still distinctly specific. In the real world there are many families that have unlimited power and money. Our fiction reflects this reality.

It is possible to see the many faces that are in power. There are as many different ways to corrupt it as those who own it. Writers can use the family unit to represent a larger system, and then portray vast systems through interpersonal conflicts. How so many series tackle this fact, and how they see these dynastic families crumbling or somehow surviving despite it all, informs how we might view our country’s seemingly inevitable and long-forestalled decline.

Photo: Ryan Green/HBO

Photo by ABC

Photo by Paramount

Photo by Graeme Hunter/HBO

From the top, clockwise: All four families of Righteous Gemstones and Promised Land are staring at each other intently.

Yellowstone follows the massively-successful ranchers of the Dutton family, led by Kevin Costner’s John Dutton, a “speak softly and carry a big stick” type who reigns over the family ranch, which in square acreage is larger than some European countries. The Righteous Gemstones follows the Gemstone family, led by John Goodman’s massively rich televangelist and patriarch Eli Gemstone while his self-sanctifying adult children (though when one of your children is played by Danny McBride, it’s hard to imagine there was ever any chance for a stable personality) live in excess of wrath, pride, most of the other seven deadly sins.

Roy Family of SuccessionPower is even more tangible and can be found in media. The Roy family’s Waystar-Royco corporation has hands in everything from children’s entertainment to streaming services to video games to news in a right-wing multimedia monstrosity in the vein of the Murdochs and the Koch brothers. Finally there’s the most recent series of this study, Promised LandIt takes the time to envision an empire that is not controlled by white men. It centers on Mexican American Joe Sandoval’s Heritage House vineyard and his children’s dubious desires for its future, complicated by the fact that Sandoval himself is, as we find out in the pilot, an undocumented worker living under a false identity. Here are four families, four empires, and four permutations on the same root question of what to do — and who bears the blame — when a family business is at risk of collapse.

These shows’ structure of malcontent children orbiting a collapsing father figure is hardly a unique or original way to form a story in and of itself. Shakespeare’s King LearThis play was an adaptation of an English legend dating back to 12th-century England. It provided the framework for the August patriarch, who had to deal with his quarreling children and his failed retirement. For centuries fathers have struggled to keep their hands clean. But there’s something fascinating about the way that so many shows have focused on a house in disarray as we experience what seems like the fall of America and the slow-motion crash of national dysfunction.

Perhaps this rise of waning empire shows is a natural progression from the “golden age of television” and the advent of the leading man antihero. Tony Soprano, Jimmy McNulty, Walter White, and Don Draper were all one-man empires, holding their personal and professional lives a bit too close together to be sustainable, despite the protagonist’s best attempts to keep their spheres apart. We were watching the world around them fall apart because they had to be. The mythical Great Man (because it’s usually a man, though let’s save some love for Jackie the NurseWe watch as he tries to control every aspect of his life. However, the lonely man will eventually be redeemed. A self-destructive, morally grey protagonist is not enough. You know what’s better than Walter White? A whole family made up of Walter Whites. Each Walter White is a master of his craft and holds repressed anger.

Photo by Paul Sarkis/ABC

Who each show decides to cast as, for lack of a better term, the “hero” tells us much about each series’ central beliefs. To be continued Succession And The Righteous Gemstones, the focus is on the children and how they do or don’t measure up to the expectations set down for them, as well as how they squander the tremendous opportunities afforded them by their privileged position. You can read more about In Yellowstone And Promised Land, the structure is inverted: the patriarch is the only one who can right the ship, and even if he can be thick-headed and stubborn at times, ultimately Father has to know best to preserve the status quo and preserve the main character’s control over the narrative. The older generation passed some of the unsustainable damage to the new generation in each of these four shows. The father is able to remedy the situation in the second and third cases.

But whether father really does know best isn’t always assured. Gemstones And Succession They disagree. From their point of view, misery was passed down from one generation to another. The endless loop of toxic family resentment and toxic familial anger bears no promise of resolution, particularly not with the involvement of the fathers.

The American concept of the nuclear family is popularized by these television series. It’s a mythical idea that a well-controlled family can be created with just 2.5 children and one loyal dog. The nuclear family is entirely self-sufficient and needs no larger community to lean on for support — the true American way is for each family to be fully under control.

We see the end of insularity as well as the collapse of nuclear families. No matter how rich or powerful they are, the family cannot protect the rest of this world. Children marry and have spouses who are both good and bad. Characters become enamoredAnd obsessed with each other when they try to shrink the entire world down to just their family members — see Roman Roy’s obsession with his siblings’ sex lives, and Beth Dutton’s similar fixation on insulting her brother Jamie’s masculinity and sexuality.

These families’ hunger for total control — of their legacies across all four families, of their literal products in Promised Land and The Righteous GemstonesWhat will happen to these last names? They would like to operate in a vacuum, a perpetual-motion machine where their money itself makes them enough money to sustain a lavish lifestyle, but the rigors of the world (and the narrative structure of episodic TV) mean that their sense of prosperity will be threatened by others who want what these characters have, but haven’t exactly earned.

Photo by Graeme Hunter/HBO

Photo: Ryan Green/HBO

Each empire exemplifies a different aspect of American excess. The Roys’ all-out conservative blight is the most obvious one, but the Gemstones’ empire of converting faith into dollars is just as insidious (and typically conservative-aligned) as the Waystar-Royco’s media machine. The Dutton Ranch stands for America’s bloody domination of land occupied by Indigenous peoples (which the show often casts as either antagonists opposite the Dutton clan or as outright villains), and its ardent refusal to cede this land back to its original stewards or to even acknowledge the centuries of cruelty and inhumanity that has come with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

These four shows are the best. Promised LandAny attempt to slight invert social order and to show an identity marginalized that has achieved the impossible. Joe Sandoval’s American miracle, where he pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Even so, the success has come at the cost of participating in the same capital system that created every other intractable and tyrannical patriarch, to a further degree than you or I are forced to cooperate in modern society’s endless parade of low-volume inhumanity. Sandoval’s business practices are no better than Logan Roy or Josh Dutton, both of whom instill a cultish devotion from their underlings (ranch hands in YellowstoneThey are branded like livestock managers, which is a testament to their subordinate status as laborers. The cost of excelling in capitalism is higher than just participating — to win, you have to put more skin in the game than your own, and profit off of the blood, sweat, and skin of others.

This story of dysfunctional families is gaining popularity. SuccessionThe show has received a lot of praise from the audience and critics. The Righteous GemstonesIn its second season, the show has kept a curious balance between crime drama and satirical comedy. Yellowstone Spinoffs might just be the best hit. 1883 Untold Paramount Plus subscriptions were launched (like my father, who has never opened Netflix). Two other spinoffs are reportedly being developed to showcase the Dutton empire at different times and places. It wouldn’t be an empire without multiple conquered territories.

Pop-cultural obsessiveness about the demise and decline of all kinds of empires seems almost too easily connected to contemporary events and current world affairs, but it’s worth consideration. In an empire in decline, we’re watching stories that make this systemic breakdown feel like the exploits of a few spoiled kids, either warped by their fathers or for whom the father is their only hope. As American empires, be they cultural, political or financial, fall, so will the American people. Like so many before it, the fall will be tragic or hilarious.