by Christos Zampounis

Kevin Kostner did not attend last year’s Golden Globes to accept the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series. The cause? The floods in Santa Barbara.

Exactly one year later, “adverse weather conditions” have been transferred to the survival of the series itself. The 69-year-old Oscar-winning actor for “Dancing with the Wolves” appears to be walking away from the modern Western, despite the astronomical $500,000 per episode he was paid. The reason? He wants to make his own series with a similar theme. It is true that “Yellowstone” was the “child” of another, the most prolific screenwriter of the last decade, Taylor Sheridan.

Anyone who has followed the career of the Texan actor at the beginning, then director, then creator and producer at the end, cannot help but admire his deep knowledge of the Wild West, as we used to call it – and still very much so. I quote indicatively: “Hell or High Water’, ‘Wind River’, ‘Mayor of Kingstown’, ‘Tulsa King’, and, of course, ‘Yellowstone’. While this article is being written, I read in Variety, that he has acquired the rights to a book chronicling the 40-year war between white settlers and the Comanche tribe. The title being “Empire of the Summer Moon”. For diligent viewers, let me recommend watching Sheridan’s work from the beginning rather than the end, even if Kevin Kostner in the “end” rose to the category with the masterpiece of the title.