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.”

‘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.