Season 1 wraps this Sunday, but Season 2 kicks off next week.
The decision-makers at CBS know a good thing — i.e., a ratings grabber — when they see one, so they’ve announced plans to continue airing edited reruns of Yellowstone on Sunday evenings.
The current batch will wrap this Sunday, Oct. 22, with “The Unraveling,” the Season 1 finale, in which rancher John Dutton (Kevin Costner) must discover which family members and allies will stand with him as he faces outside forces. The following week, on Oct. 29, CBS will present the Season 2 Premiere, “A Thundering,” which has Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes, seen above with Costner) settling into his new role at the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch while a damaging article threatens to expose John, and Chief Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) pitches his new plan to the tribal council.
Back in our July 2019, we spoke with Grimes and series co-stars Cole Hauser and Wes Bentley about possible Season 2 plot developments.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that while Season 1 of Yellowstone consisted of nine episodes, Season 2 consists of ten, meaning we’re pretty much guaranteed a steady stream until mid-to-late December. After that? Well, that depends on when the ongoing actors’ strike ends, how quickly new episodes of new and returning series can be produced, and how long CBS will continue to need Yellowstone episodes that originally aired on Paramount Network to plug holes in its prime-time schedule. Truth to tell, given the ratings success currently enjoyed by those reruns, CBS might not mind carrying on with Seasons 3 and 4, and perhaps even the first half of Season 5.
Consider: According to the showbiz trade paper Variety, “The series debuted on CBS on Sept. 17, snagging 21.6 million viewers to date that have tuned in to at least one episode of Yellowstone, according to the network. 52% of those viewers are new to the series, having not seen a single episode in the past year on either linear or streaming… [T]he debut episode alone delivered 6.6 million viewers to CBS. That figure eventually jumped to 7.5 million total viewers after three days of delayed viewing via VOD, DVR and other platforms.”
Since then, Variety reports, Yellowstone has averaged an audience of 5.49 million viewers for each episode.
Meanwhile: The concluding episodes of Season 5 won’t premiere on Paramount Network until the actors’ strike ends. And, yes, not before Kevin Costner and producer Taylor Sheridan bury the hatchet. Assuming, of course, Costner is going to be a part of the “final cycle.”
