Well…you know, when you get invested in a show for most of it and then when the show runners try to get “edgy” they screw it all up…and that’s how I feel about the prequel to “Yellowstone” called “1883″….and there are going to be spoilers in this one so if you haven’t finished or seen it yet, probably better to stop reading right now. Up until the last episode, it was a pretty good if violent show but I’m not sure if it was really a true depiction of what life was like on the plains as people moved west…I mean, no boredom or anything like that but just death, death, and more death…much like if Mad Max had taken place on the plains of the US instead of Australia…and at the end, when the entire final episode was a dragged out death of what I saw as the main character…a young woman coming of age on the trail, the investment of the viewer was betrayed by the need of the show runners to continue the shock value that permeated the show…and then when the trail boss played by Sam Elliot kills himself sitting on the beach of the Pacific Ocean after the wagon train falls apart, it was just gratuitous and didn’t need to happen…I know the character had a tough life losing his wife and daughter to disease and then the death of the young woman who had become his ersatz daughter hit him hard, too…but, do we need that much reality? I know that the late 1800′s were pretty whitewashed as we were taught as kids but I wanted to be entertained not slapped in the face and that is just what the ending did. I’m not sure what Taylor Sheridan was thinking when he wrote the show that way, but making your audience work that hard to enjoy some escapism is just too much….and it turned me off “Yellowstone” to be honest…