In the second episode of “Yellowstone,” Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes), clearing a patch of Montana land, blows up a tree stump with explosives. In the resulting crater, he finds a half-exposed dinosaur fossil.

This discovery feels like the sort of thing a writer — in this case Taylor Sheridan (“Hell or High Water”), who also directs — places as a metaphor: for the ancient history of the West, for secrets deeply interred, you name it.

But it also makes a pretty good metaphor for the series itself. “Yellowstone,” which begins Wednesday on Paramount Network, has a few interesting things buried within. But you need to dig through a lot of drab, hard-packed filler to get to them. The series seems to do that almost inadvertently, and only partially.

The surface layer of “Yellowstone” is part modern-day Western, part family business saga — a kind of cowboy “Dynasty” with some dark-cable ambitions. Standing atop it is the flinty personage of John Dutton (Kevin Costner, in ornery-cuss mode), the owner of Yellowstone Ranch, an expanse of grass, hills and testosterone the size of Rhode Island.