You may not see as much chatter about “Yellowstone” on social media or may not know anyone who watches the show at all. But since it began airing on Paramount Network in 2018, Taylor Sheridan's neo-Western has become a bona fide megahit.

According to Nielson (via Variety), Season 5A was the most-watched entertainment program of the 2022-2023 TV season, averaging 11.6 million viewers per week. This made the first half of the fifth season the only non-sports offering with an average of more than 10 million viewers per week. When Paramount decided to air the “Yellowstone” pilot, in which John Dutton's eldest son Lee Dutton meets his fate, on CBS in 2023, 6.6 million viewers tuned in, half of whom had never seen the show before . This meant that Yellowstone gained a whole new set of viewers by airing on a traditional channel, further cementing the show's reputation as a true TV behemoth.

Who watches this show? Mostly fathers. The series is aimed at an older audience, so there isn't much social media hype and younger audiences have probably never heard of Kevin Costner's ranch owner John Dutton and his travails. Any way you look at it, Costner himself played a huge part in the success of “Yellowstone,” and when it was announced that he wouldn't be returning for the long-awaited Season 5B, dads all over the world wondered how that happened Earth, the show was meant to explain the sudden loss of the Dutton patriarch and the character her favorite series revolved around.

However, it seems that series creator Taylor Sheridan never gave this particular issue any thought, as he knew how the series would end before it even began.

The debacle surrounding Kevin Costner's exit from “Yellowstone” has been drawn out and downright confusing. On one hand, the veteran star claims he hasn't received any details or scripts for the show's fifth season, which has made it difficult for him to pursue his passion project, the “Horizon: An American Saga” film series. On the other hand, Taylor Sheridan and Paramount claim that Costner made planning for the second half of the season difficult due to his commitment to this very project. Needless to say, there is no romantic relationship between the two sides and Costner is clearly not part of what were originally touted as the final episodes of Yellowstone. It has since been reported that Beth Dutton actress Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser, who plays ranch foreman Rip Wheeler, are in talks to star in a potential sixth season, which will be a very different one without Costner's John Dutton at the center will be a series.

Meanwhile, “Yellowstone” went to great lengths to ensure that none of the cast or crew knew how Season 5B would end, handing out redacted scripts and generally making it very difficult for everyone involved to leak information to the press. But for Reilly, who has been with the show since the first season, most of those efforts were in vain because, as she revealed to Entertainment Weekly in September 2024, “(Sheridan) told her the show was ending while we were there filming.” to the first season. This claim was backed up by executive producer David Glasser, who told the network: “Day one, episode one, Taylor said, 'I know exactly how this ends.'

Now, Reilly has spoken more about how Costner's exit affected that ending. As it turns out, the star's controversial exit didn't do much to change Sheridan's plans. Speaking to EW, Reilly said that John Dutton's absence was “part of the ending” from the start. She continued: “This is not something we had to change, this was already established in history. It was always going to happen, it just happened a little differently.”

Until now, the end of Season 5B of “Yellowstone” has been kept top secret, even though it has been almost two years since the end of Season 5A in January 2023. Wes Bentley hints at Jamie Dutton's fate, and Kelly Reilly remains similarly mysterious about the endings of Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler's stories. But by far the biggest mystery of all was how these final episodes will deal with John Dutton himself – especially after Kevin Costner's exit.

However, according to Reilly, this challenge was made somewhat easier by the fact that Taylor Sheridan always assumed his show would last five seasons. “In (Sheridan’s) head it was always going to be five seasons,” the actor told EW. “But because the show became so successful, the network and everyone wanted more. In a way, fate took them and we ended this part of 'Yellowstone' the way he always imagined it would.”

It remains to be seen how Sheridan managed to pull off his original ending for the series without Costner, but you can be pretty sure that dads around the world will be tuning in to find out when Season 5B of “Yellowstone” finally premieres on November 10, 2024.