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18 Shows and Movies Like Yellowstone to Watch While You Wait for Season 5 Part 2

Everyone wants to be like Yellowstone

liam-mathews
Liam Mathews
Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser, Yellowstone

Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser, Yellowstone

Paramount Network

Will Yellowstone be back? The off-camera drama surrounding Taylor Sheridan's modern Western has everyone wondering if Kevin Costner will return to play John Dutton, and whether the current Season 5 will be the final chapter of the megahit. But even if we don't get more Yellowstone, we can live off of shows that were influenced by (and influences for) the Paramount Network series. Because let me tell you something: There are a LOT to watch while you wait for Season 5 Part 2 to arrive. 

We have some recommendations for shows and movies like Yellowstone to watch in the interim. Some are Taylor Sheridan productions, some are dramas about wealthy families behaving badly, and some are modern Westerns. All of them will make you want to head out West, where the sky is big and the drama is bigger. 

Yellowstone Watch on Peacock


More recommendations:


Ride

Beau Mirchoff, Nancy Travis, and Tiera Skovbye, Ride

Beau Mirchoff, Nancy Travis, and Tiera Skovbye, Ride

Hallmark

If you're looking for another wild Western ride that you'll need to hang on tight to stay with, then maybe this is the show? This new Hallmark Channel series is focused on the world of rodeo riding in Colorado, but if you're a fan of Yellowstone's cowboy family drama, you might get what you need with it, albeit in a more Hallmark-friendly package. Nancy Travis stars as Isabel McMurray, the matriarch of a tight family picking up the pieces after they're struck with tragedy, uncovering a web of secrets and new romantic entanglements after someone is out of the picture. New episodes air Sunday nights on Hallmark and stream the next day on Peacock. 


George & Tammy 

Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain, George & Tammy

Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain, George & Tammy

Dana Hawley/Courtesy of SHOWTIME

Yellowstone started a wave of premium quality shows whose audience overlaps with people who enjoy country music, and George & Tammy is right in the middle of that Venn diagram. The limited series chronicles the tumultuous marriage of country superstars George Jones and Tammy Wynette in the '60s and '70s, with Michael Shannon playing Jones and Oscar winner Jessica Chastain playing Wynette. They do their own singing and capture the intensity of George and Tammy's volatile passion. Like Yellowstone, it's an adult drama with great actors working in a classic, crowd-pleasing genre (in this case, the musician biopic). One of the show's producers is 101 Studios, the company behind Yellowstone. They know what they're doing over there. 


1883

Tim McGraw, Sam Elliott, and Billy Bob Thornton, 1883

Tim McGraw, Sam Elliott, and Billy Bob Thornton, 1883

Emerson Miller/Paramount+

1883 is a prequel to Yellowstone that tells the story of how John Dutton's ancestors got to Montana. James Dutton (Tim McGraw) is leading his family on a perilous journey across the Great Plains alongside Pinkerton agent Shea Brennan (Sam Elliott), a tough old cowboy with a heart of gold. It's an old-fashioned Western with beautiful cinematography. It's an on-the-road show more like Lonesome Dove than Yellowstone, but Taylor Sheridan hallmarks like artfully macho dialogue and an impressive sense of authenticity in its cowboy-life details will make fans of the flagship show feel at home in the earlier time period. If you want to know more about the differences and similarities between Yellowstone and 1883, check out our review


The Terminal List 

Chris Pratt, The Terminal List

Chris Pratt, The Terminal List

Prime Video

The Terminal List isn't like Yellowstone in the way that most of the other shows on this list are. It's not a Western or a family drama. Amazon's Chris Pratt-led action blockbuster is a conspiracy thriller about a Navy SEAL getting revenge on the people who wronged him, which is a different style of story than the ones you find in Yellowstone's soapy sprawl. But The Terminal List wouldn't exist without Yellowstone in a very specific way. Yellowstone showed that there was a huge, underserved market for conservative prestige TV, which has the movie stars and production budgets of more typical high-end Hollywood productions but don't see the world from the liberal perspective most Hollywood productions default to. If you like that Yellowstone provides quality entertainment without pushing a political agenda you don't agree with, you'll find that The Terminal List does something similar, though much more bluntly. Characters on The Terminal List watch Fox News, which doesn't feel like something that would happen on the less partisan Yellowstone


Joe Pickett

Michael Dorman, Joe Pickett

Michael Dorman, Joe Pickett

Spectrum

The success of Yellowstone has single-handedly brought the neo-Western genre to the forefront of television, and we're starting to see heroes in cowboy hats flood our televisions. One that's not a pale imitator is Joe Pickett, a Spectrum original that's been given new life (and a new audience) now that Paramount+ has picked it up. The series, based on the rural detective books, stars Michael Dorman as Joe Pickett, a game warden in Wyoming, where most aren't too respectful of a guy with a badge telling them what they can and can't hunt. Joe gets himself involved in a murder investigation when a man turns up dead on his doorstep, which brings him face to face with a criminal family, a whole lot of unsavory characters, and even an emu. -Tim Surette


Outer Range

Josh Brolin, Outer Range

Josh Brolin, Outer Range

Richard Foreman/Amazon Studios

There's no way this mind-bending sci-fi Western wasn't pitched to Amazon as "Yellowstone meets Lost." Josh Brolin, a Taylor Sheridan veteran from Sicario, stars in creator Brian Watkins' Prime Video puzzler as Royal Abbott, a Wyoming rancher who discovers a large, mysterious hole on his property that seems to have some kind of supernatural power. In a thread that's shamelessly borrowed from Yellowstone, people are trying to take the ranch from Abbott and his family — one of the aspiring buyers is Wayne Tillerson, a wealthy rancher played by Will Patton, who Yellowstone fans will recognize as Jamie Dutton's biological father Garrett Randall — but Royal refuses to sell, at least not until he figures out what the deal is with this hole. The sci-fi element gives Outer Range something very different from Yellowstone, but the setting, cinematography, casting, and performances are all heavily influenced by TV's reigning Western hit. 


Mayor of Kingstown

Kyle Chandler and Jeremy Renner, Mayor of Kingstown

Kyle Chandler and Jeremy Renner, Mayor of Kingstown

Paramount+

Taylor Sheridan is one of the hardest working people in Hollywood (his corner of Hollywood is a historic ranch in Texas that he owns). Not only is he busy with all those Yellowstone spin-offs, but he co-created the Paramount+ series Mayor of Kingstown, which has been renewed for a second season. Though not set anywhere near a ranch, it features lots of Yellowstone's touchstones: a rugged leading man (Jeremy Renner, who also starred in Sheridan's Wind River), complex dynamics between strong characters, and tough guys being tough guys. Renner plays a power broker in Michigan whose business is prisons, mixing him up with politicians, the police, and criminals as he struggles to keep his empire afloat. -Tim Surette


Hell or High Water

Ben Foster and Chris Pine, Hell or High Water

Ben Foster and Chris Pine, Hell or High Water

Lorey Sebastian/CBS Films

This 2016 heist thriller about two brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) who go on a bank-robbing spree to get enough money to buy back their family ranch from the very bank they're robbing is the movie where Taylor Sheridan became Taylor Sheridan. Sheridan was nominated for an Oscar for his intelligent, lived-in screenplay, and the movie also earned nominations for Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Jeff Bridges, who plays the grizzled Texas Ranger on the brothers' trail. More than that, though, Sheridan's distinctive voice as a writer that became mega-popular with Yellowstone was crystalized here, more so than it was in Sicario, his darker, more cynical first screenplay. Hell or High Water has a lot of the same elements as Yellowstone: a contemporary Western setting, a strong sense of place (West Texas, in this case), a sort of libertarian populist bent without any explicit political agenda, and profanely poetic Western dialogue. Five seasons into Yellowstone, Sheridan's pronouncement-heavy dialogue has grown a little self-parodic, but it still feels fresh and focused here. The cast includes Gil Birmingham, Yellowstone's Thomas Rainwater. And like Yellowstone, it's about people trying to hang on to their home and way of life. 


Wind River

Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner, Wind River

Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner, Wind River

Right before Yellowstone sent Taylor Sheridan into the Hollywood stratosphere, he wrote and directed 2017's Wind River, a drama about a U.S. Fish and Game tracker (Jeremy Renner) and an FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) who team up to solve a case of sexual assault and murder on a Native American reservation in Wyoming in the dead of winter. It has all the Sheridan trademarks, including intense action sequences, a connection to the land, and challenging character dynamics.


Those Who Wish Me Dead

Angelina Jolie, Those Who Wish Me Dead

Angelina Jolie, Those Who Wish Me Dead

Emerson Miller

Taylor Sheridan's most recent movie stars Angelina Jolie as a skydiving firefighter who encounters a boy – played by Finn Little, also known as Yellowstone's dirty-shirted orphan ranch hand Carter – on the run from assassins who killed his father. Her journey to get him to safety is complicated by the two assassins (played by Nicholas Hoult and Aidan Gillen) pursuing them, and the blazing fires that surround them. If you like Sheridan's style, Those Who Wish Me Dead is definitely worth checking out. -Allison Picurro


The Son

Pierce Brosnan, The Son

Pierce Brosnan, The Son

Van Redin/AMC

If you'd like a show that's something like a mashup of 1883's period setting with Yellowstone's family ranch drama, mosey on over to the 2017 drama The Son. The series aired on AMC for two seasons and also stars a well-known face — Pierce Brosnan — as the head of a ranching family. The difference here is that The Son is set down south in Texas across two different timelines, the 1840s and early 1900s, following Brosnan's character Eli McCulloch as a young boy when he was taken by Comanches and as a father who has difficulties connecting to his son in the show's present timeline. But the premise is eerily similar to Yellowstone: Stay the hell off my ranch!


Let Him Go

Diane Lane and Kevin Costner, Let Him Go

Diane Lane and Kevin Costner, Let Him Go

Focus Features

Calling all Costner heads. If your favorite thing about Yellowstone is seeing present-day Kevin Costner in the American West, you should be all over this movie, in which he plays George, a retired sheriff turned horse farmer mourning his son. But it goes beyond the standard "grizzled older man learns about his feelings" trope, as it quickly becomes clear that the movie is actually about George and his wife, played by Diane Lane, leaving their ranch in Montana to track down their young grandson and their daughter-in-law, who has recently re-married an abusive man. It's less of a quiet family drama and more of a high-stakes thriller, and Costner is just so dang good in it. -Allison Picurro     


Dallas

Larry Hagman, Dallas

Larry Hagman, Dallas 

CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

If you want to watch the proto-Yellowstone, Dallas is the one. Yellowstone isn't subtle about being Dallas for the 21st Century, swapping in land rights for oil. They're both cowboy-hatted soaps about a rich, fighting family, with similarly heightened melodramatic tones. Season 3 of Yellowstone even ended on a "Who shot J.R.?"-style cliffhanger. The difference is that Yellowstone is made to also feel like a premium cable show with bloody violence, swearing, and nudity that they couldn't get away with on '80s broadcast TV. It's the Dallas Dallas couldn't be.


Succession

Brian Cox, Succession

Brian Cox, Succession

HBO

Yellowstone is about the Mountain West elite, and Succession is its East Coast counterpart. The shows have pretty much the same premise: A difficult, demanding father and his emotionally stunted adult children fend off attacks on their empire from all sides, while fighting amongst themselves over who gets to be daddy's favorite (or at least his least-disliked). The trappings of wealth manifest a little bit differently — Yellowstone has a fleet of fancy pick-up trucks, while Succession has a mega-yacht — but they're both about the corrosive effects of that wealth on the soul.


Longmire

Robert Taylor, Longmire

Robert Taylor, Longmire

If your favorite part of Yellowstone is its Western setting, this crime drama will be a satisfying next step. Robert Taylor stars as Walt Longmire, the sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming, who investigates Western-tinged crimes while battling his personal demons. Like on Yellowstone, conflict and negotiation between the region's white and Native American residents is a major theme, with a particular focus on Longmire's relationship with the Cheyenne reservation's tribal police force, led by Chief Mathias (Zahn McClarnon), which has its own authority and sometimes works with him and sometimes doesn't.


Sons of Anarchy 

Charlie Hunnam, Sons of Anarchy

Charlie Hunnam, Sons of Anarchy

FX

The similarities between Yellowstone and Sons of Anarchy are numerous. SAMCRO and the Yellowstone are both families/gangs that are hard to join and harder to leave. Both shows have an obsession with codes of masculinity — toxic or otherwise — and an outlaw spirit of us-against-the-world ruggedness. The women in each family are tougher than any of the men (Katey Sagal's Gemma on Sons and Kelly Reilly's Beth on Yellowstone). Charlie Hunnam and Luke Grimes vibe on the same frequency. There's even some significant personnel overlap: Yellowstone's co-creator, writer, executive producer, and director Taylor Sheridan acted on Sons of Anarchy as Deputy Police Chief David Hale, and his co-creator John Linson also executive-produced Sons of Anarchy. In a very real way, Yellowstone would not exist without Sons of Anarchy. SoA spin-off Mayans M.C. is another macho soap in a similar vein to these other shows.


Ozark

Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, Ozark

Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, Ozark

Netflix

If you love the crime family part of Yellowstone, Ozark will hit the same sweet spot. Jason Bateman and Laura Linney star in this hit thriller as Marty and Wendy Byrde, a married couple who move their family from Chicago to the Lake of the Ozarks region of Missouri after Marty's job laundering drug cartel money goes wrong, and they quickly get involved with the criminal element in their new red state home. Like Yellowstone, it has the level of acting and production value you'd find in a top-tier prestige drama being used in the service of pure popular entertainment. 


Breaking Bad 

Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad

Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad

AMC

Hear me out: Contemporary Western setting, family drama revolving around a difficult and demanding father figure and his conflicted son, occasional forays into hair-raising brutality, neo-Nazis, Jeremiah Bitsui, a constant feeling of "this is all going to turn out very badly," a star who talks in a very growly voice. Yellowstone lacks Breaking Bad's relentlessness, but it has a lot of other things in common.