Lifestyle
How 'Yellowstone' writes off Kevin Costner's towering patriarch
Finn Little as Carter and Cole Hauser as Rip Wheeler.
Emerson Miller/Paramount
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Emerson Miller/Paramount
(Be warned: This review discusses details of Sunday’s Yellowstone episode, Season 5, Ep. 9, “Desire Is All You Need.”)
It took about five minutes for viewers who showed up for the new episode of Paramount Network’s hit series Yellowstone on Sunday night to learn how they would write off Kevin Costner’s towering patriarch John Dutton.
Early on, police filled the mansion where Dutton was living, as governor of Montana. Viewers couldn’t see Costner, but there was a body shown next to a handgun in a pool of blood. The verdict was obvious: Suicide by gunshot.
But since fans had seen Dutton’s son Jamie (Wes Bentley) conspiring with his girlfriend in a previous episode to have professionals kill his father, another cause seemed imminently possible. (To be fair, Jamie suspected the elder Dutton might come after him, first.)
Kelly Reilly, as Dutton’s flame-haired, volatile daughter Beth, makes that connection right away, later unleashing a wave of anger-fueled grief likely to earn an Emmy nomination.
The biggest question left: Will Beth and sibling Kayce (Luke Grimes) take vengeance on Jamie?
Still, heady as this western-flavored soap opera seems, it pales in comparison to the real-life drama which required this plot twist in the first place.
Kelsey Asbille as Monica Long Dutton, Brecken Merrill as Tate Dutton, Luke Grimes as Kayce Dutton.
Emerson Miller/Paramount
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Emerson Miller/Paramount
Clashes between star and showrunner
Sunday night’s Yellowstone episode marked the return of Season 5, which has aired in two parts. The first half premiered way back in November 2022; the writers’ and actors’ strikes of last year created some production delays for Part 2.
But Costner, committed to his self-financed Old West film trilogy Horizon, also reportedly clashed with Yellowstone co-creator and showrunner Taylor Sheridan and network producers. This was like Godzilla versus Kong – an Oscar-winning star of one of the biggest shows on TV pitted against the guy who seems to be creating every original show on Paramount+ that isn’t a Star Trek spinoff or Frasier. (Sheridan talks about the controversy to The Hollywood Reporter here.)
Eventually, Costner confirmed he wouldn’t return for the fifth season’s second half. So it’s small wonder the star’s taciturn family leader was written off in dramatic fashion for this episode, setting the stage for a war within the family over control of the sprawling Yellowstone Dutton Ranch.
Yellowstone has succeeded as a lushly-produced family soap opera centered on the ranch, its cowboys (and cowgirl) and Dutton’s fight to preserve both the homestead and the way of life which maintains it.
On Sunday, that meant uncorking an episode hinting at the future of the show without the patriarch who once was the series’ focal point. A mid-episode time jump six weeks into the past, before Dutton’s death, ensured there wouldn’t be a funeral scene Sunday – exposing another time worn element of the soap opera, stretching out the drama.
‘Yellowstone’ soars depicting the cowboy life
Instead, we got a heavy dose of the cowboy lifestyle, watching Cole Hauser’s Rip Wheeler lead a crew from the Yellowstone Ranch down to Texas with a load of livestock. Yellowstone is often at its best when it’s showing us a modern version of the cowboy’s life we rarely see on big TV shows – illuminating the lives of working class men and women living lives filled with hard work, endless open skies and a very demanding culture.
Of course, Sheridan can’t resist poking at the people who aren’t a part of that culture – like a moment in Sunday’s episode where Rip lets a well-scrubbed little boy pet the horses he’s shepherding, before telling a young couple with wild hair and scruffy looks to buzz off.
When the couple asks why they can’t pet the horses, too, Rip unloads on them like they cut him off in traffic. “You do it once, and you’re being nice…you do it a second time, and you’re being a petting zoo,” he says angrily. “This ain’t no f***ing petting zoo.”
It’s tough to know what they did to earn his anger besides looking like a couple of Gen Z kids on their way back from Coachella.
It’s tempting to call Yellowstone prestige TV for red states — featuring a high-quality elevation of traditionalism and rural lifestyles, while positioning characters from urban centers and each American coast as interlopers and villains. The show’s focus on whiteness deepens that feeling, with almost no Black or Latino characters and Native American storylines often at the edges of the series.
But, like many of Sheridan’s shows, a significant theme involves resisting modernity and upholding old ways — especially the tradition of Dutton’s family holding onto all the land they’ve controlled for generations — without a lot of sentiment spared for the Native Americans they likely had to push aside to take it over in the first place.
“You know, in 30 years from now, nobody’s going to be doing this,” Rip says, drinking with his cowboys in Texas, railing against a future he imagines will include wind farms across the land and beef imported from Brazil.
(The show even found time for a touching cameo by legendary spurs and horse bit maker Billy Klapper, who died in September at age 87. Sunday’s episode was dedicated to him.)
Ultimately, the core drama at the heart of Sunday’s episode felt more than a bit like a ramped-up, modernized version of Dallas – featuring a wealthy, powerful family at war with itself, as control of the ranch and the state of Montana hang in the balance.
It’s too early to tell if Yellowstone can maintain its momentum without the movie star who helped build its success. But Sunday’s episode revealed bold moves; if Costner’s departure does make the show falter, it’s going to go down – like its characters – fighting hard.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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