"Cowboy boot camp" has become a bit of a tradition within the Yellowstone franchise. Before filming, actors will typically take two weeks to really get into their roles by learning to do tasks you typically find out on the range—which includes everything from learning to ride a horse to perfecting your walk while wearing spurs on your boots.
However, it's not enough to just fake your way through all this cowboy training. According to 1923 actor Brian Geraghty, series creator Taylor Sheridan wouldn't accept anything less than completely convincing. "He's a cowboy. You gotta not only ride a horse, but look like you know what you're doing."
The intense frontier training that creator Taylor Sheridan subjected the 1923 cast to sounds pretty awful. These actors signed up to PLAY cowboys, not BE cowboys, after all! However, despite the hard work that they had to put in, it seems like most of the actors look back fondly on their training days.
According to the actor who plays Zane Davis on the show, the harsh training really helped to bring the cast together and create lasting bonds. He had this to say about their boot camp experiences—"We got to have highs and lows together before we started, which actually was really good for bonding. We would all be terrible, and then the next day progress. We all got to be vulnerable. As adults, it's not easy to learn a new skill."
We're not even all the way through season one yet, but it's clear that the executives at Paramount already have bigger plans in the future for 1923. The show has already gotten approval for two seasons, which is not something you routinely see in the world of TV. However, this might not all be good news for fans of the show.
Sure, we've been guaranteed another season of frontier drama, but the announcement that the show has been approved for two seasons makes it seem like this might be a limited-run series. Plans could always change in the future, but we don't expect that we'll be seeing much of this iteration of the Duttons beyond two seasons.
Yellowstone and its two spin-offs, 1923 and 1883, all follow the same family. However, they all take place decades apart, so there's not a ton of overlap when it comes to characters. But that all changed with the release of 1923. In this newest Taylor Sheridan series, we get to say hello to a character who first appeared in Yellowstone and then 1883.
The character John Dutton made his first appearance in flashbacks in Yellowstone and was portrayed by Jack Michael Doke. Then, in 1883, we saw Dutton again as a child, this time portrayed by Audie Rick. In 1923, Dutton appears again as a grown man portrayed by James Badge Dale.
Paramount Pictures clearly believes in Taylor Sheridan and his talent to create amazing television because they've thrown hundreds of millions at him and his shows that follow the lives of the Dutton family. However, it appears that, when it comes to costs, 1923 is the most expensive of his shows yet.
Sheridan himself admitted this is his most expensive series, saying, "I would argue that 1883 was the most expensive first season of a TV show ever made. This [1923] was much more expensive. Much more expensive." It's estimated that each episode costs upwards of $30 million to create.
Series creator Taylor Sheridan has had some great luck in nabbing high-profile stars for Yellowstone and its two spin-offs. However, the casting for 1923 has to be the most star-studded we've seen from him yet. The entire cast is great, but there's no denying that Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren are the real stars of this show.
What's really crazy about these casting choices is how little it took to convince these big-name actors to join the cast. According to Taylor Sheridan, he invited both Ford and Mirren to his ranch and got them to sign on without a finished script. He states that he waited until the wine started flowing to pop the big question!
Yellowstone, 1883, and 1923 are all set in Montana, so it makes sense that a large majority of filming takes place in the state. However, sometimes Taylor Sheridan is literally willing to go halfway across the world to nab the perfect shot. Is there anything this guy won't do for a hit TV show?
While most of 1923's filming did take place in Montana, several scenes required going out of the country to the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. There's not a lot of information about which scenes were filmed out of the country, but they must have been important if they were worth such a long trip!
Taylor Sheridan clearly knows a thing or two about TV ratings. All three of the series he has created for Paramount have gone on to be critical masterpieces that manage to draw in a ridiculous number of viewers. However, 1923 is currently his biggest hit yet!
According to the number released by Paramount+, the show's debut episode was the biggest in the history of the platform, with more than seven million viewers tuning in. From Rotten Tomatoes to Metacritic, the show has been raking in praise and acclaim left and right as well.
While there isn't much character crossover at all within the Yellowstone universe, 1923 does at least give us some connections to characters we've seen before. Specifically, Harrison Ford's character, Jacob Dutton, has a close bond with an important character seen in 1883—Tim McGraw's character, James Dutton.
Considering all these shows chronicle the lives of the Dutton family, it's probably not super surprising to learn that Jacob Dutton and James Dutton are brothers. However, you shouldn't expect any cameos from McGraw in this new series—it's revealed in the final episode of 1883 that James Dutton died in 1893.
While Yellowstone, 1883, and 1923 are all works of fiction, all three shows have dealt with real-life problems to some extent or another. Since Yellowstone takes place in the modern day, we see the Duttons dealing with conflicts like land developers and Indian reservations. 1883, on the other hand, sees the Duttons deal with the aftermath of the Civil War.
So, it's no surprise that the Duttons in 1923 are dealing with their own real-world issues. Some of the biggies include Prohibition and the fallout from the end of World War I, but there's another problem that might surprise some viewers. Despite the fact that the Great Depression peaked in the 1930s, it hit places like Montana a decade earlier, so we also see the family struggle with that.
