In terms of pure conversational dominance, this year’s seen two prestige TV shows currently leading the pack. One is Euphoria, the teenaged SoCal high school drama cut like a Hype Williams music video. It’s HBO’s most popular show since Game of Thrones. The other is Yellowstone, Paramount Network’s triumphalist neo-Western, which is shot stoically in the Montana plains and stars Kevin Costner, an actor who is into his fourth decade of fame. The show is so popular that it is single-handedly keeping alive outdated metrics of viewership.
Despite enormous audiences—Euphoria averaged 16.2 million viewers for the just-concluded season 2; Yellowstone hit 9.3 million for its January season 4 finale episode—the overlapping viewer who watches both shows seems, anecdotally at least, close to non-existent. If you were trying to describe America’s generational divide by way of TV shows, you could hardly do worse than picking these two. Especially if the line you drew between them was “the age of 40.”
Yet, there are more similarities between the shows than it might seem. Both shows flatter the aesthetic preferences of their demographics. Both have a soft relationship with narrative coherence (and in Euphoria’s case, objective reality). And both shows gesture, with equally hyper-watchable sensation, at the generational anxieties of their audiences: Yellowstone is about the difficulties of preserving the past, while Euphoria is about maintaining your humanity through unprecedented opportunities for stimulation and vanity. But let’s be more blunt: Euphoria is Yellowstone for Zoomers, and Yellowstone is Euphoria for Boomers.
Perhaps most importantly, both also boast creative visions formed by unusually individualistic television men. As prestige TV has absorbed more airspace in the broader entertainment economy, writers’ rooms and production teams have grown, not shrunk. This makes sense: a diversity of viewpoint is increasingly important in the television landscape, and huge budgets are typically executed through tight systems of checks and balances, in any industry. But these two showrunners, Sam Levinson (Euphoria) and Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone), buck the trend. Levinson has sole writing credit on every Euphoria episode except for one, and has directed all but three episodes. Sheridan’s proportions are a little less lopsided, but only because he has entered Shonda Rhimes/Ryan Murphy levels of everywhere-ness, simultaneously managing so many other shows granted to him because of Yellowstone’s massive success. Despite this heavy load, it’s been two seasons since anyone besides Sheridan got a writing credit on Yellowstone.
Sheridan and Levinson have both attained a truly rare thing in on-screen storytelling, especially outside of the IP fish-in-a-barrel category: auteur range. Because of their shows’ tremendous viewership, it’s unlikely that either man is about to be put in check by their corporate overlords. Yellowstone and Euphoria are the products of an uncommon dramatic wildness—one that reflects, above all, the bizarre and fractured inner carnival of a single person’s psyche. And if you’ve come this far with either showrunner, you should know by now that Levinson and Sheridan cook their ingredients more toward extremity of flavor than cohesion of meal.
Here’s one really easy example: The recent two-episode finale of Euphoria’s second season centered on a school play written and directed by Lexi Howard—a role played by Maude Apatow, who is, like Levinson, the child of a big-time Hollywood director. Welcome to the meta funhouse, representing Levinson’s own struggles with his cast and the loud cultural feedback loops surrounding the show. For all the moments chronicling acute teen anxieties—like during a memorable scene in which Barbie Ferreira’s character Kat suffered from extreme influencer claustrophobia—Euphoria is just as often about what stresses out 37-year-old Levinson.
Between the seams of Euphoria’s ragged deconstruction of tragically misunderstood young people are Levinson’s efforts to make his own adult showrunner self one of these touchstones of empathy. “Some people need to get their feelings hurt sometimes,” soft-hearted drug dealer Fez tells good-girl Lexi, defending her savage dramatic representations of friends in the play. Backstage, as the show devolves into chaos, Lexi’s sycophantic co-producer murmurs to another character that “art should be dangerous.”
In context, the platitudes read as Levinson publicly justifying his process—to his audience, or maybe to himself. Controversy has long swirled around the audacious, salacious nature of the show, and more recently reports have come out about the ethics of Levinson’s workplace, chronicling its performers’ growing discomfort with his insistence on nudity, among other things. Reporting on the show reveals the experience of a cast weary of their auteur’s meandering, insanely horny vision.
As much as Euphoria is a shockingly effective display of what arouses its director, it is also a showcase for what upsets him about contemporary social media rhetoric. In several conspicuous season two moments, we see characters badly misunderstanding power dynamics while spitting out hollow, internet-friendly social justice jargon. (Cue: Rue saying there need to be more women drug lords.) This sometimes-funny parade of topical strawmen ultimately comes off as bespoke grumbling—a sign of the disconnect between Levinson, an elder Millennial, and the Zoomers who make up much of the Euphoria audience. The result is teen women speaking like men in their late 30s, stopping just short of blaming “cancel culture” for everything that worries them about a changing world.
Like Levinson, Taylor Sheridan’s vice grip on Yellowstone‘s steering wheel led to some out-of-touch storylines in the show’s fourth season. John Dutton (Costner) is a lonely widower, occasionally involved with his state’s foxy governor, but mostly filling his void by preventing developers and financiers from stealing his huge piece of land, and by being an over-involved father of children well into their thirties. But in the show’s latest slate of episodes, a new woman enters Dutton’s life.
Played by Piper Perabo, Summer Higgins is a comparatively young animal rights activist. Something you might understandably forget, as the show constantly escalates by way of bloody extra-military campaigns and soap-operatic political intrigue twists, is that Dutton is a cattle rancher. So Higgins is an even less fitting romantic partner for him than Fez is for Lexi, on paper. But she and John hit it off, perhaps because the show is in an era where it needs that extra little something—or maybe because Sheridan just required a means to belittle vegetarians and leftist organizers.
Higgins is frustratingly clueless about everything she fights against, and about how the world works in general, creating an easy target for the show’s conservative worldview (“I am the opposite of progress” is something of a proud refrain on Yellowstone.) The character fits into a larger pattern of Sheridan enemy construction. The man behind the show has given us a lot of liberals like Higgins, or John’s Harvard graduate son (Jamie, played by Wes Bentley)—people who don’t belong in the modern iteration of the frontier west. They are shrill know-nothing parrots who have never gotten their hands dirty, or feckless weaklings who can’t fill a ten-gallon cowboy hat. It’s easy to see how this recurring dynamic, played out in idyllic natural setpieces, pleases an audience yearning for analog simplicity in the increasingly overstimulating digital world Euphoria documents in neon colors. The West, as Jane Campion says, is a mythic space. Sheridan’s inviting his viewers to believe the myth that their ways were right, and the new ones are wrong.
Even if their themes may differ, audiences of Euphoria and Yellowstone connect viewers as collectives in a way that few others can. These shows are breathtakingly, uncannily nuts, because Sheridan and Levinson have made TV their own boutique ranch, where the gnarliest animals of their psyche are free to roam. They’re magnetic viewing, which you can depend on to slap around and recalibrate your brain. We’re all letting Sheridan and Levinson lead us in gnawing on topical triggers—every one of us an equally jumble-brained barfly getting soused on the vivid atmospheric mess. Perhaps America can watch these Euphoria and Yellowstone together instead of apart, uniting over their creators’ spectacular, singular obsession with freaking out about change and trying to figure out the world as it is, whether anyone gets there or not.