Yellowstone prequel ‘1923’ is a rollicking western saga with a stellar cast

Helen Mirren is an acting powerhouse, and the new series 1923 makes it clear from the opening scene that her character, Cara Dutton, is not the kind of American frontier matriarch you want to mess with. 

Bleeding from the head and brandishing a shotgun, Cara confronts an armed ruffian in the wilderness. Things don’t go well for the ruffian. “Violence has always followed this family,” the voiceover explains.

It’s a cracking start to the new TV series from filmmaking genius Taylor Sheridan that spins off from both Yellowstone and its prequel, 1883. The scene is Montana, one hundred years ago. The modern world is starting to arrive in the towns, with electricity and motor cars, but that's of little account to the cattle ranchers out on the prairies. Here, rival farmers compete for grazing land in the face of a locust plague, and the disputes can easily turn deadly. There’s still plenty of wild left in the old west.

This is the ongoing saga of the Dutton family, headed up by Jacob Dutton – played, in another casting coup for the Paramount+ series, by Harrison Ford, who incidentally has a new Indiana Jones flick arriving in cinemas this year. In parallel with Jacob’s caustic rivalries with sheep farmer Banner Creighton (Game of Thrones’ Jerome Flynn) and Cara’s brokering of the marriage of her great nephew Jack (Darren Mann) is the storyline of their youngest nephew Spencer Dutton (Brandon Sklenar), the handsome yet traumatised veteran of WWI who makes a living shooting big game in Africa. Then there are the trials of young Teonna Rainwater (Aminah Nieves), a Native American brutalised by nuns in a Catholic girls’ boarding school.

Expansionist power struggles; romance and danger in colonial Africa; the young fighting racist injustice – 1923 has no lack of gripping dramatic arcs. Not to mention that stellar cast: in addition to Ford and Mirren, keep an eye out for former Bond Timothy Dalton as a powerful business tycoon, Pride and Prejudice's Jennifer Ehle as a Sister of Mercy with no mercy whatsoever, and Robert Patrick from Terminator 2. And while context on the Yellowstone universe may help, you can also dive into it cold – no prior knowledge required.

To access 1923, subscribe to Paramount+ here. And if you needed extra motivation, Paramount+ is also the streaming home of Top Gun: Maverick, the blockbuster Tom Cruise epic that seems set to burnish its box office triumph with Oscars glory. Find out more about Paramount+ here.