Apart from National Football League games, the series Yellowstone is the most watched show on television, consistently averaging more than 12 million viewers per episode. Yet, in its five years of production it has never been nominated for a single industry award in any category. In that same period, the series Succession has garnered non-stop awards and accolades. Succession’s highest-rated episode got only about a tenth of the viewers that a typical Yellowstone episode did in the 2022 season. All this despite that Yellowstone is only available on one source while Succession is available across a number of streaming platforms. Granted that award shows are critic-based and not view-based, but one has to wonder if this disparity has underlying significance.

Succession centers on the Roy family, the owners of global media and entertainment conglomerate Waystar RoyCo, and their fight for control of the company amidst uncertainty about the health of the family’s patriarch. Yellowstone centers on the Dutton family, owners of the largest ranch in Montana, the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch. The plot revolves around family drama at the ranch and the bordering Broken Rock Indian Reservation, Yellowstone National Park, and land developers. It is a multi-vector fight between Native American, cowboy, and outsider/elite values.

To date, Yellowstone has never won an Emmy. Its New York–media–focused competitor, Succession, which also debuted in June of 2018, has captured 48 nominations, winning 13 times. In September, it won Outstanding Drama Series for a second time in 2022. Just yesterday, Succession was nominated for 27 Emmy awards from best drama to a slew of acting awards. Again, Yellowstone was not nominated. Some have suggested that Yellowstone—which the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has called “the most red-state show on television”—is just too “anti-woke” to win favor with Emmy voters. Others suggest the critics simply haven’t watched it.

“Though very different from each other in setting and sensibility, the two shows are mirror images. Both have at their core an aging, raging, tyrannical patriarch trying to hold on to an empire (a ranch in one case, a media conglomerate in the other), threatened by a changing world he doesn’t like or understand while trying, King Lear-like, to fend off his own heirs, whose fecklessness, incompetence, addictions, and general psychopathology would seem to make them ill-suited for taking the reins of the enterprise. Both feature these patriarchs pitting their deeply flawed children against one another in sometimes vicious ways. Both are dark, edgy, and occasionally soapy. You can make a parlor game out of drawing parallels between the various characters.” [The Atlantic]

While there are production and artistic values that can be debated regarding the quality of the acting and the show, it might well be that the disparity is also accounted for by the cultural and political bubbles we’ve sorted ourselves into. Succession—depicting and aimed at coastal elites—is omni-present on Twitter and at awards shows. Yellowstone is popular in the heartland and Sun Belt. And while that, on the surface, might show a connection to the conservative values, Yellowstone is clear in raising issues such as the displacement of Native Americans and the way Native American women were treated. Another major theme centers on corporate greed, the gentrification of the West from New York and California elites, the modern version of old west land grabbing. Perhaps the most significant theme is conservative environmentalism – ala Teddy Roosevelt. In all this, what is clear is the depiction of the moral consequences of certain behaviors and decisions. Underlying it all is Yellowstone’s connection to the moral plane governed by cowboy virtues: honor, bravery, physical labor, respect for tradition, and a willingness to die—and kill—in defense of your family and your land.

Ross Douthat of the NY Times writes: “Both are about what you might call family capitalism, the portion of American business that remains right wing even as corporate power centers like Wall Street and Silicon Valley tilt to the cultural left. But Succession is a savage jeremiad, inspiring sympathy for its characters only insofar as they’re prisoners of familial pathology. Whereas the central theme of Yellowstone is that family capitalism is flawed and sinful but corporate capitalism is worse and it’s better to be ruled by a patriarchy than a private-equity raider or a faceless board.”

Both shows are dominated by characters whose behaviors, on their best days, are morally questionable. In the end it is hard to care about which morally corrupt person will prevail in Succession, while perhaps one appeal of Yellowstone is the trajectory of the story: Yellowstone patriarch can’t ultimately win — we are watching and appreciate something familiar in Western lore, the doomed last stand – even as we hope those cowboy values will prevail. At the same time, we fear the moral cost of their triumph.