One of Sheridan’s strongest gifts as a storyteller is imbuing potentially arcane land rights disputes with emotional urgency. Stateside, Ford’s patriarch is pressed by local discontent and mismanagement of the land. One puzzle piece involves Jacob’s nephew/adopted son, Spencer (Brandon Sklenar), a first world war veteran dodging PTSD by tracking murderous big game (and showing off the American cowboy’s stoic, brashly physical brand of masculinity) for uppity British colonizers in Kenya.

The director Ben Richardson (a cinematography veteran of several Sheridan series, including Yellowstone) takes the landscape appreciation global, with several gorgeous shots of the African savanna. Much of 1923’s hour-long premiere – the only episode made available for review – is similarly expository, stage-setting ambitiously disparate pieces that will presumably come together for a Sheridan-esque power struggle amid panoramic mountain vistas. A century before Costner’s twilight-era political machinations on Yellowstone, it’s already crumbling. As Elsa relays in clunky albeit informative voiceover, Jacob moved to Montana years ago to save his brother’s family after John’s death, and built an empire. He gazes from atop a horse across a field dotted with decaying cattle, swarmed by flies over-grazing, drought and pestilence already portend the Dust Bowl. Cut to another unidentified man barely escaping a lion’s pounce – “and where it doesn’t follow we hunt it down, we seek it”.Įnter the grizzled visage of Jacob Dutton (Harrison Ford, in his first major TV role, at age 80), his twitching frown framed by canyon-deep lines, his cowboy hat crawling with locusts. She’s following up a cold intro, after Cara Dutton (Helen Mirren) wins a reloading war and kills an unidentified man. Epic sensibilities abound from the jump: “Violence has always haunted this family,” says the voiceover of Elsa Dutton (Isabel May), the fiery pioneer daughter of the Dutton ancestors John and Margaret (played by the country superstars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill) in 1883. Sheridan’s latest star-studded Yellowstone prequel, 1923, extends the same ethos back in time, to a limbo era between the wars and before the Depression, between the pre-prequel limited series 1883 and Kevin Costner’s gravelly modern patriarch.

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