Kevin Costner’s New Series Is the Most Unsettling Western the 70-Year-Old ‘Yellowstone’ Star Has Ever Made

Ever since seeing How the West Was Won at the age of seven, Kevin Costner fell in love with the Western genre, a passion that he has always been vocal about. His first film as a director, 1990’s Dances With Wolves, is a Western, and a wildly successful one at that, landing the Best Picture Oscar, the first Western to win in the category since 1931’s Cimarron, and six other Oscars. Over the years he’s appeared in a number of Westerns, which have largely brought out the best in Costner.

That love for the Western has never been more prominent than now, with his role as John Dutton in Yellowstone and his passion project, Horizon: An American Saga, two recent examples of his work in the genre. Add to that list the eight-episode docuseries on the History Channel, Kevin Costner’s The West, which premiered on May 26, 2025. Costner hosts and narrates the series, and serves as executive producer alongside historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. It’s a look at the history of the American West, but if you’re looking for feel-good, cowboy-rides-off-into-the-sunset-with-his-gal stories, look elsewhere, which is something Costner discovered working on the project.

‘Kevin Costner’s The West’ Shocked the ‘Yellowstone’ Star

Costner explained in an interview with Fox News Digital about what he found during the filming process, a shocking revelation to a man so well-versed in the Western genre:

“Everything I found, almost everything I found was tragic. Isn’t that weird? Every story — there weren’t a lot of happy endings, although there were people that made it on the backs of these kind of people were … zeroing in on.”

That it would shock Costner tells a story unto itself about how disparate the Hollywood Western is from the truth (a story for another time). Costner spent a lot of time learning about the period for the series to ensure that what comes across in Kevin Costner’s The West is the unflinching, unflattering, and often dark truths of the history of the American West. He compares the goal of taking that uncompromising look at the truth of history to sports, an analogy that works better than you might think. “You and I know the score [of the game], right? …nobody can bulls**t us about who won,” he starts, adding that while news is open to interpretation and bias, sports itself is truth, where a win is a win and a loss is a loss, and you can’t spin it any other way. “Let me see how raw it [history] was,” Costner sums up, “Let me know how real it was.”

What he found was that living in the West was far more difficult than the idea of the plucky pioneer and his family setting up shop in the untamed West. Many people were forced to live there, without the tools or talents to be able to do so effectively. “They went in groups, and they sometimes perished as groups, and their humanity was alive,” Costner explains, “And their worst tendencies came out, and their best tendencies came out.” But he also tells the story of those that had what it took, pointing to a man named John Colter as a perfect example. As Costner tells it, Colter was a mountain man, perfectly fit for being out there [the West], hunting and creating some of the “greatest, wildest stories ever.”

‘Kevin Costner’s The West’ Tells the Tragedy of the Native Homeland

One of the uglier truths Costner was confronted with while filming Kevin Costner’s The West was how settlers took over the land from the Indigenous peoples, and forced their ideas onto them. Hollywood has only really started to change the narrative around Native Americans, with Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon one of the prominent films at the forefront of exploring historical injustices, but the series is able to put those injustices into context with the rise of the American West, a more concise, unfiltered exploration as opposed to dramatic representations of specific tales.

In researching that aspect of history, Costner says, “I know I learned things, I was thinking about these missionaries who went back and had to talk people into funding them to let them go, and then they tried to bring their religion to these poor people.” He also points out that the tragedy of the native homeland wasn’t death by sword, won by settlers in glorious battle, but by a million small cuts, so to speak. Settlers moved across the country, and while doing so told the Indigenous peoples different, constantly changing stories: “We don’t want your land, we just want to move through it”; “We do want your land, and you need to cut your hair”; “We have your land, and now you must change your religion to ours.” Settlers took the land by confusing people, and it was only when the natives couldn’t be convinced that the hammer came down. “We murdered them, and we made up convenient stories to do it,” Costner says, “These places don’t have their names anymore. We named them after ourselves.”

Kevin Costner’s The West explores how the American West was built on tragedy, triumphs, and perseverance by all peoples, not just European settlers. And, at least according to Goodwin, Costner was perfect for the role “due to his spiritual connection to the West and his contagious enthusiasm.” What is perhaps unexpected is just how perfect Costner is for the series. He didn’t head into the project with narration in hand, walk into a recording booth for a couple of hours, and walk away. Rather, Costner connected himself with Western series and its goals by taking the time to actively research what it is he’s narrating, shocking himself with the revelations that came with doing so but willing to present it, warts and all, nonetheless. The idea of the Western hero winning the girl and getting a happy ending won’t die anytime soon on the silver screen, but that was never the aim for Kevin Costner’s The West. Costner’s aim is to show how we got from the untamed wilderness to the American West of today, not as we think we know it, but as it truly — and tragically — was.