Hollywood is making a lot of expensive television these days, and every show has something.

House of the Dragon has dragons, the Mandalorian has space battles, and succession has billionaires

on yots. But there's one show that stands out. Yellowstone. It's a Western set on a Montana

ranch. Our colleague Eric Schwarzl says one episode can cost close to $20 million. Yellowstone

is a TV show that 20 years ago we would have thought had the production quality and scale

of a big screen theatrical movie. It starts Kevin Costner as the kind of patriarch of

this, this ranching dynasty, and it's trying to be as true to the setting as possible.

It might be the only medic in that right? It might be. Like film on location, they have

a lot of horses, they have a lot of cattle. It's taken off with this really potent combination

of just kind of messy family drama and frontier justice. So it seems like it's kind of taking

us back to the John Wayne days in some ways, but it's also like Grey's Anatomy on a ranch.

Yellowstone was created by the writer and director Taylor Sheridan, and not long after the

show debuted on Paramount, it became one of the most popular shows on cable. Paramount

ordered more and more shows from Sheridan, making him one of the most powerful showrunners

in Hollywood, power that Sheridan has used to create an empire. But last week Paramount

announced a $1 billion loss last quarter, in part because of increased spending on streaming

content, which begs the question, why is Yellowstone so expensive?

I think this is a story about the very weird, very idiosyncratic way that Hollywood does

business, and what can happen when a hitmaker in Hollywood finds that perfect storm of having

a hit show and having a studio that can't afford to alienate him.

Welcome to the journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Limebond,

it's Friday, May 12th.

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