The Catalogue

John Dutton, a ranch owner and the family patriarch, runs a loss making enterprise of raising and selling cows for beef in the State of Montana, next to the Yellowstone National Park. The ranch spans several miles with beautiful landscapes and without any modern amenities, including roads. Needless to stay, it gets attention of the California and New York businesses for opening resorts and airports, with the future same as Breckenridge, Colorado. The problem is John Dutton doesn't want anyone entering his ranch, let alone sell it, but the wealthy are determined to acquire it by any means. There is also another problem, an Indian nation, who wants the ranch back to its fold, before the Dutton family arrived 150 years ago. So the drama unravels with guns, politics, kidnapping, deaths, and legal maneuvers. Honorable crime is the name of the game. One can kill but it doesn't mean one is guilty. There is a difference between killing and murdering! Not made for a faint heart, the show is gripping despite plenty of violence, including the sexual one.

The key that makes the show unique in not the Dutton family's fight with the outside world, but its struggle within it, which adds to the complexity. No one is spared, not even the dining table where no mean if ever finished. But the person who steals the show is Beth Dutton, the daughter of John, and an insane person yet lovable. No women likes to be her but admire her, and men don't even bother coming close. She will shame you to the death. She is the only person who lives in modernity and prefers riding Bentley and Mercedez over horses. Her boyfriend-turned-husband, Rip, is the only one she rides more! Rip strangly is a cowboy.

Although Beth is a show stopper, other characters are no less important and plays there role to perfection. They all have their fans, even Tait, the grandson of John Dutton. Jokes are plenty, and dark humor is the underdog.

The show is streamed on Peacock as of 2025 and runs for five seasons. It is not for self-moralizing environmentalists or vegans. Beth will beat you to the hell, like she did to Summer, her father's part-time girlfriend who complained how can one eat "Dove", the bird of peace! If that humiliation was not good enough, Beth sarcastically suggested to her father, John, that if you want to have a hooker, at least have a better and expensive one!

If you think John Dutton was badass, then you haven't met his great-granduncle Jacob Dutton, played by Harrison Ford. Jacob Dutton is the family patriarch in 1923 TV Series, where he has two seasons to protect the ranch from a wealthy banker, who wants to convert the ranch to a tourist resort.

Jacob is shot multiple times in an ambush, but survives. He is loosing men and cows to maintain his land and has no source of income. His wife tries best, but they are running out of time.

There is one hope. Their estranged nephew, Spencer Dutton, who is roaming in the jungles of Africa, killing tigers and protecting British tourists. He left the ranch a while ago, but needs to return to it to save the family and the family property. The struggles of return are real, considering its 1923 and there are no airplanes. Only way is ships, boats, trains and horses; a several months of journey. The return is further complicated as Spencer is separated from his newly wed wife from a Royal family of England, which disapproves the wedding

The wife and husband separately chart their path to Montana, and finally meet in Bozemann. But they are not alone; gunmen from the banker is waiting to kill them, and the rest of the Dutton family.

An orgy of shootout happens. Who wins is not in question, after all it is the show on the Dutton family. How they win is more important and breathtaking.

In the Yellowstone TV Series, the Indians frequently claim the Dutton ranch belong them generations ago, before John Dutton's great-grandfather took it from them. The question may have arisen, who are Duttons and where they came from. The pne-season 10-episode 1883 answers that question.

The Duttons came from Texas, when James Dutton (Jacob Dutton's younger brother), decided to move to Portland, Oregon, with his family. He had his wife, his sister, her daughter, and his own daughter and a son. While initially planning to move alone with his family, he is persuaded to travel with an European caravan who has the same destination. The journey is arduous, and on the way he looses his sister and her daughter, and many other caravan companions.

But it not the show about James Dutton, but his daughter Elsa Dutton, who comes off her age and aid her father in the journey. She becomes the first cow-girl, dates another cow-boy (before he dies) and eventually marries an Indian.

But she also undone by an Indian tribe, who mistakenly attacks the caravan, fatally injuring Elsa. She has limited time, and Portland is far away. While most of the caravan disintegrates, the Dutton family ends up in Montana, and with the help of an Indian tribe, gets a piece of land next a river to restart their life. This is the place where Elsa decides to die, and this is the place that becomes the Dutton Ranch.

There was only one thing about the gifted land. That after five generations, the tribeman will come and reclaim the land. James Dutton agreed, but everyone else forgot. But fate had it in the last episode of Yellowstone that the land went back the Indian tribe.

Truth is stranger than fiction. It is also unpredictable. While there have been many nuclear disasters, none have been like Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It occurred at the peak of the cold war and could have destroyed a continent. The story of the disaster is essential to be told to the general public. What happened? How did it happen? How was it contained? And more importantly, what was the human cost? Both in terms of population effect and the people involved in the containment zone. There is no better way to tell the story than via cinema.

The 5-part TV series “Chernobyl” produced by HBO is a must watch masterpiece. It is bingeworthy. It is both suspenseful and factual. It covers the accident in detail, action taken by politicians (aka Soviet comrades) and role of scientists in determining the cause. The characters are real and the situation they face is unprecedented. Watching the series is like observing it in real time from a distant view. Whether it is the worry in the face of Mikhail Gorbachev, or the wife of a firefighter caring for her radiation infected husband, it is deeply personal. And deeply factual.

Killing of animals because they were contaminated is cruel and scientific at the same time. Ordered not by a politician but a scientist who cared for the future generation. The lives of people changed overnight, and they have to find a new home for the rest of their lives. An old woman who didn't leave her village since birth, despite living the fears of the two world wars, Nazi occupation and Soviet capture, had to succumb to the radiation to find a new home.

And finally, the culprit: Was it a human error or the faulty rods? While the TV series ends blaming the system and faulty rods, the answer is more profound. Shouldn't scientists consider human error when designing a reactor? Especially when the stake is high, like in the case of a nuclear power plant. These are the questions one is left wondering at the end of the series. And the thing that makes it so real and thought-provoking are the characters and the actors portraying them. I am glad that HBO made the TV series and I watched it.