According to the writer and creator of the show, Yellowstone, he was told repeatedly by Hollywood executives when he was initially shopping the pitch of creating a show where most of the action occurred on a ranch in rural Montana, that, “We won’t pick up a show that pitches stories from rural areas. It’s been that way since the 1970s. We only pick up stories that we can market to the urban areas of the country.”

If this is an accurate anecdote, and memories of pitch meetings in Hollywood are notoriously full of holes, and Hollywood hagiography is its own form of storytelling, what it means is that for at least three generations in American popular culture, the myth of the city as the only place where “the action is” has been actively marketed over the reality we all live with in our lives.

That’s not to say that urban stories and myths aren’t part of the fabric of the American myth. They clearly are, all the way back to the Boston Tea Party. But it does open the door to thinking critically about how much of the post-modern mythos about the sexiness of urban living is just really marketing by Hollywood executives with a directive to follow from their immediate bosses.