The Power of a Brand: Paramount, Heartland Narrowcasting, and Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone

Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone is, above all, the story of a brand. By situating the popular series in relation to both the streaming and culture wars, as well as a related schism in academic media studies, this article proposes that the political economy of media corporations and the narrative aesthetics of media texts must be understood in tandem. As the Paramount Network’s signature property, Yellowstone manifested the channel’s demographic mission to include women and “narrowcast” to heartland viewers. By sophisticated generic and narratological innovations, Yellowstone went further to create an aesthetic protocol of brand loyalty where the process of branding, at once ancient and modern, physical and symbolic, was made self-consciously central to the show’s redescription of rural cowboying as a cultural identity and marketable lifestyle. The show’s intertwining of branding and belonging, as well as its vigorous use of product placement and merchandising, modifies prior assumptions in the field of franchise studies. In the gap between brand synergy and brand dilution, Yellowstone presents itself as a paradigmatic case study for the new imbrications of narrative entertainment, commodity fetishism, and identitarian politics.