'1923' Was Ambitious. Did Taylor Sheridan Pull It Off? | |
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This story contains spoilers for 1923 episode 7. Howdy, folks! We've finally reached the end of 1923. It only took a supersized two-hour finale featuring shoot-outs, long-awaited conversations between characters who had never spoken to each other before, and the fulfilled promise that Spencer would finally make it to the Dutton family ranch. There's a lot for us to cover. But first, I want to take us back to the season 1 finale. After watching the final episode, I returned to the conversation I had with Spencer Dutton himself, Brandon Sklenar, in early 2023. Esquire called him "The Baddest Dutton of All Time" then—and he certainly lived up to the title in the series finale. I wanted to see if he dropped any hints about the ending that I didn't pick up at the time. I was feeling a bit nostalgic too, okay? Covering Yellowstone—and its spin-offs—has consumed much of my professional life for the past three years. And I wouldn't change a thing about it, to be clear. Until Paramount tells us otherwise, both Yellowstone and its prequels have come to an end. Before a single tear rolls down this cowboy's face, let's cut back to Sklenar. "It's essentially Homer's Odyssey," he told me after season 1. "There's so much built into it with him getting home and he has so much to fight for and so many people to defend… It's just such a sweeping character arc, and I'm just so fortunate. The man we meet in [Season 2] is a much different man from who we see at the end of this season." Spencer's arduous journey home tested the patience of 1923's audience more than anything else this season. I'm sure that most of you watching at home certainly thought season 2 wouldn't send the Dutton hero on another wild goose chase across the globe. Hell, he doesn't set foot in Montana until the series finale. But now that I see the whole picture, 1923 was certainly Sheridan's adaptation of the Odyssey for the American West. If you're not familiar with the Greek tragedy, Christopher Nolan is currently adapting the legendary epic for a 2026 film starring Matt Damon. The story follows Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, who experiences a perilous journey fraught with monsters on his way home from the Trojan War. Meanwhile, his wife Penelope attempts to hold off an unruly assembly of young men who wish to wed her in his absence and become the new king. Trade Penelope for the Dutton family ranch and you basically have the outline for 1923. After fighting in World War I, Spencer fends off lions in Africa, bulky gladiators at sea, and even the Italian mafia in Texas just to make it back home. Then, he kills everyone who threatens the ranch. It may sound silly to say, but Sklenar is right. 1923 is Sheridan's Odyssey. It's quite the story as well for Alexandra Dutton, Teonna Rainwater, Banner Creighton, and every other ancestor of a character we come to know in Yellowstone years later. However you may feel about Spencer walking into Whitfield's home and shooting him without a struggle, the ending wrapped up Sheridan's most sprawling story yet. Largely, I'd say he pulled off something emotional and exciting week by week. Remember folks, this was just a limited series. I'm sure that Sheridan doesn't need his ego stroked any more than it already is—Landman was just renewed for season 2—but give this man a real budget and let him work. I'm sure he could write a modern Western that would even make John Ford weep. |
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As the hero of our story, Spencer is revealed as John Dutton's grandfather. The great Dutton family tree mystery is now complete. There is a throughline from 1883's James Dutton (Tim Graw) to his son, Spencer, and then the premature John Dutton Jr. That baby is John Dutton III's (Kevin Costner) father. Fans believed that they had it all figured out last week following Jack's surprising death, but it turns out the line Sheridan wrote in Yellowstone season 4 about John Dutton's grandfather losing his leg was either his maternal grandfather or just something the writer forgot about entirely. Oh well! Speaking of plots that slipped Sheridan's mind… what happened to Elizabeth's baby? Many fans theorized that Spencer would end up raising Jack and Elizabeth's child instead of his own in the finale, but Elizabeth packs her bags for Boston and departs without a single mention of her pregnancy once the ranch is saved. Is there a Bostonian Dutton family out in the world somewhere? It's also a shame that Spencer never remarried because awoooooga, am I right? According to Elsa's narration, Spencer, "took the comfort of a widow, made another boy, refused to marry her, and one day, the widow was gone." Incredibly spooky! Still, it sounds like John Dutton has a lot of uncles and cousins that we never knew about until now. Maybe we'll meet them in 1944, The Madison, or any of the numerous spin-offs that Sheridan writes next. |
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Okay, back to the mushy stuff. Even cowboys can cry! Much like Alexandra sacrificing her entire body to keep the Dutton family legacy alive, I'm finally ready to let go as well. It has been an absolutely wild ride writing about this crazy show for you all. I hope you enjoyed 1923 as much as I did—or at least laughed along when the show took itself too seriously—and I thank you again for reading. For a full recap of the massive finale, you can read all my thoughts right here. Before you go, I'm excited to announce that this newsletter isn't going away just because 1923 is over. The Cliff-Hanger will continue to postgame the most important TV shows of the moment with exclusive interviews, recaps, and insights just like this. Next week, HBO premieres the first episode of The Last of Us season 2. It's a post-apocalyptic drama starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey that's about to really shake its story up in the second season. Plus, we already have an exciting lineup of interviews headed your way. Since the show airs on Sunday nights, this newsletter will hit your inbox on Mondays starting next week. So don't change the channel, Duttonheads and TV fanatics. The Cliff-Hanger will return! Have thoughts or theories you need to share about the 1923 season 2 finale and the Yellowstone-verse moving forward? Send me an email at josh.rosenberg@hearst.com. Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here. |
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The Cliff-Hanger's Winners and Losers of the Week |
Winner: Banner Creighton Last week, I said that Banner Creighton (Jerome Flynn) was fighting the wrong enemy. As much as I wanted to see him kill Donald Whitfield himself, I understand that was a job for the Duttons. Still, I'm glad he finally had a change of heart in the finale and saved his family—even if he couldn't live to see it through. Jerome Flynn is a fantastic actor. When he tears up to his wife about wanting to look his son in the eyes as a good man? Heartbreaking. Loser: Donald Whitfield Has a fantastic villain ever fallen so pathetically as Whitfield? I felt like I mentioned my disappointment with Timothy Dalton's character every week here in The Cliff-Hanger. The potential of this character was completely wasted. He's the ultimate Loser of the Week. Winner: Unintentional Comedy Maybe this is cruel, but I was dying laughing every time Alex said something at the hospital along the lines of, "They want to take my legs and my hands." This woman really went through hell and the fact that it would've ended with her losing all of her limbs is so insane. At one point, she asks Jacob, "How can I raise a child with stubs for feet and clubs for hands?" with full sincerity. At some point as a TV writer, you must see the campiness of the situation settling in. Loser: Doctors I mentioned The Pitt here once before. The Max drama has received heaping amounts of praise from the medical community for its accurate depiction of healthcare. 1923 is not that show. They may both feature scenes in which a doctor drills through a patient's skull to remove excess bleeding, but the doctors in 1923 are dolts. There's a scene in which a surgeon is searching for a bullet in Jacob Dutton's old wound, and he tells him that if he can't find it then the lead poisoning might slowly kill him. "You think I care about the slow ones?" Jacob yells. "I'm 80 fucking years old. Sow it up!" Winner: Harrison Ford Ford has another killer line at the end of 1923. When they finally catch up with Whitfield, he tells the villain: "I plan on making such an example of you that it'll be fifty years before one of your kind dares to enter this valley again! I want them teaching about how you die in schoolbooks!" Badass, Mr. Dutton. Badass. |
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| The Yellowstone Team Is Throwing It Back to 1944 |
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 For most of us, the 26.2 miles of a marathon represent the epitome of athletic endurance. For others, there are the ultramarathons, races that stretch to fifty or one hundred miles or more through some of the world's most inhospitable regions. The Badwater 135 winds through the middle of Death Valley in July. The Marathon des Sables is a six-day, 156-mile race across the Sahara Desert. The Hardrock 100 is a high-altitude hundred- miler amid lightning storms and avalanches. And then there is the Barkley Marathons. Officially, it consists of five loops through Frozen Head State Park in Tennessee, totaling one hundred miles, but most participants believe it to be closer to 130. Runners must ascend and descend about 120,000 feet of elevation—the equivalent of climbing up and down Mount Everest twice. And all this must be done in just sixty hours. As of race time this year, of the more than one thousand people who have run it, only fourteen have finished. |
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An hour and three minutes. It probably won't surprise you that Noah Wyle, who once again plays an ER doctor with preternatural attention to detail on The Pitt—and knows damn well that the clock often decides the difference between life and death—cites the exact amount of time until his next meeting. It's not because he doesn't want to Zoom with me on a Monday morning; it's because I jumped the gun and asked about season 2. An hour and three minutes? The time until his next writers' room meeting for the sophomore run of Max's breakout hospital drama. But I'm getting ahead of myself. On Thursday night, The Pitt dropped its penultimate episode, "8 P.M.," on Max. In it, we see Wyle's Dr. Robby struggle to recover as his world collapses in the wake of the mass shooting at Pitt Fest. His quasi-stepson blames him for the death of his girlfriend at the tragic event. He's still feeling the trauma of his mentor's death during the pandemic, and he's led his team through an unimaginable shift full of truly heartbreaking cases. "The waves are just crashing over his head and he's finally going under," Wyle says. "Somewhere between then and when we find him, he's trying everything he can to get himself out from underneath it." |
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With any new video game console, the question is always Why now? To find the answer, I woke up bright and early on Wednesday morning to attend a hands-on preview of the Nintendo Switch 2—solely because the gaming company has long responded to the question with a machine unlike anything I have ever seen before. So, when Nintendo previewed the Switch 2 (releasing on June 5, 2025), I was a bit confused by a machine from Team Mario that looks and plays fundamentally the same as the system I already own. In the larger video game industry, of course, that's nothing new. Every new PlayStation or Xbox is just an expensive computer with better visuals and more seamless gameplay. But for Nintendo? A new console generally arrives because the video game company is ready to showcase an entirely new way to play. |
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For all the spikes and daggers that is a long career in the public eye, Bacon has done the unusual thing of remaining very appealing. No one, it seems, is a Kevin Bacon hater. When I mention our interview to a friend, his question is easy enough: "Ask him how he stays so fucking cool after all these years." The meteor that was Bacon's dancing breakout in Footloose blasted American pop culture so hard that an ensuing career grew around, and perhaps never fully away from, the crater it left. Few actors know how it feels to have a role become a cultural phenomenon. To have a film, or a song, dissolve like a biologic mesh, irremovable from the identity of the person associated with it. Kevin Bacon has done so much for so long since Footloose. And yet, Footloose, probably, will always be the thing people think of first. When Bacon describes it, he sounds pensive. A little wistful, even. "Honestly, I'm still looking for the one," he says. "I've got this great career, but for a long time, the biggest success—probably to this day, actually—that I have is Footloose. I have never really had another one of those. And I would like that." |
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Obviously, smelling like your own damp sweat this summer is not an option, so instead, you've gotta find your summer scent. It should be everything the season calls for: something fresh and playful, perhaps something aquatic, or maybe even citrusy. Hell, go for a floral scent, if that's up your alley. Save your clove and tobacco scents for winter, and pull out your bright, light fragrances for summer. Don't have any in your arsenal yet? No problem—you've come to the right place. Our favorite scents for the summer are all about capturing the sunshine and bottling it up. Stop and smell the roses! Enjoy the sea salt air, the greenery, hell, even the khaki shorts! Below, see the 9 infallible fragrances our editors are obsessed with this summer. |
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As the seasons started to change, the music business machinery began creaking back into action. The new Lady Gaga album and Chappell Roan single brought that superstar buzz, and the summer tour calendar continues to fill up. Notably, these last few weeks saw the very welcome return of several remarkable women from different generations (Fiona Apple, Haim, Annie Lennox) following extended breaks. Together with a number of strong releases introducing album projects on the way, it made for an encouraging March—and a lot to look forward to in the near future. Here are the best songs of 2025 so far. |
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