Cowboy Up
It’s Taylor Sheridan’s World. We’re Just Watching It
The Yellowstone auteur is printing money with his sprawling TV universe — a place where America is great again, work is glorified, and a lone, brave man saves the day
Taylor Sheridan has a complete disrespect for one of my treasured possessions: downtime. In just seven years, Sheridan has created eight TV shows resulting in 164 episodes, the overwhelming majority of which he wrote entirely himself. Let that soak in for a moment. Here’s a quantitative but not qualitative comparison: Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul combined were shot over 14 years and total 125 episodes. That’s still a day-and-a-half of television short of Sheridan’s output.
And here’s the thing: All eight shows are hits, something that not even TV titans like Dick Wolf or Shonda Rhimes can claim. And unlike Wolf, Sheridan has triumphed over multiple genres. Sure, there are three shows in the Yellowstone universe: original recipe, 1883, and 1923, but Sheridan has since diversified with Lioness, a CIA thriller starring Zoe Saldaña and Nicole Kidman, and Landman, an oil industry melodrama starring Billy Bob Thornton and Jon Hamm. (Sheridan has three other TV colonies where he maintains only, say, 96 percent control, like the Brits had over India pre-1939: Tulsa King, Mayor of Kingstown, and Lawmen: Bass Reeves).
It is not hard to see the allure of Sheridan’s shows. He casts movie stars of a certain vintage, some perfectly utilized (Thornton on Landman), some apparently forgotten after casting (Demi Moore has fewer quality lines than Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones on the same show).
Then, he makes it all look gorgeous. Sheridan shoots Americana with Vaseline on the lenses, a greater feat on Landman, where Texas oil fields are filmed at magic hour and even the hideous burn-off of natural gas is made to look romantic. His shows can be enjoyed as either camp in the Dallas/Dynasty model or, depending on your politics, a glimpse into an America forgotten by the Hollywood suits. How Sheridan creates these worlds complements the theme of one brave man — occasionally, a woman — taking on the malignant forces hell-bent on destroying this country.
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An hour of episodic television is usually breech-birthed in a depressing Hollywood conference room filled with dyspeptic writers arguing over lines as the space fills up with the smell of fear, body odor, and Asian fusion takeout. That’s not how Sheridan works. He writes alone in Wyoming and boasts about turning out scripts in a day and sending them to his actors without studio notes. Sheridan doesn’t play well with others — he refuses to staff his shows — much to the chagrin of the Writers Guild. He tried collaboration for the Sylvester Stallone-led mob-boss-out-of-water series Tulsa King, hiring legendary Sopranos writer and Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter. It did not go well. In two years, Sheridan hired, fired, and rehired Winters, who left the show again in December.
Back to downtime, or the lack thereof. Sheridan has at least three shows, operating in different centuries and on various continents, where his characters dismiss the concept of what Daniel Craig would call the weekend. They proudly do not know what day of the week it is and do not care because, you know, there’s work to be done.
Sheridan shares this quality with Elon Musk, who claims he uses Saturdays and Sundays to crush his opposition. “It’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for two days!” Musk has said, according to The New York Times. “Working the weekend is a superpower.” Both Musk and Sheridan are Howard Roark doppelgängers who have something else in common: They have both constructed hugely influential worlds that may or may not be tethered to actual reality. So recently, I made a choice. Following Musk and Sheridan’s example, I ignored the languorous promise of a long weekend and watched 55 episodes of Sheridan’s shows in four days. I am unsure if it made me a better American.
It wasn’t quite as arduous as it sounds. I already had a sentimental attachment to the Sheridan universe and not just because I am a middle-aged white man. In 2018, I profiled the man born Sheridan Taylor Gibler Jr. shortly before the premiere of his first TV show, Yellowstone. Back then, Sheridan was known, if at all, by his scripts for the films Wind River, Sicario, and Hell or High Water, all centered around discarded people acting heroically in the face of power and violence.
I visited Sheridan at his Park City, Utah, home, and he whipped up top-notch steaks with a recipe that mysteriously involved coffee grounds. (He refused to tell me more.) We watched the Yellowstone pilot in his living room, and Sheridan’s eyes filled with tears afterward as he told me why the material meant so much to him; his mother had lost the family ranch in Texas, his childhood home, and it crushed him so much that, according to Sheridan, he spent weeks outside the ranch’s gates with a shotgun, hoping to dissuade buyers. It was like Scarlett O’Hara explaining why she would never go hungry again.
“I had no money,” Sheridan told me. “I fished every fucking fish out of the pond. I shot every deer I could fucking shoot until I was literally… I had nothing.
“I left, and never thought I’d go back,” he said. “But then you realize the ghosts weren’t there. The ghosts are wherever you are.”
Sheridan’s ghosts now have plenty of space to roam. After the success of Yellowstone, he spent $342 million to buy the 266,000-acre Four Sixes Ranch in West Texas. He began to recoup costs by charging Paramount to rent his land, his horses, and his horse wranglers for filming the show. Meanwhile, Yellowstone became a lifestyle brand, with the Dress Like a Dutton Costume Collection clothing line, cutting boards, and coffee mugs. While it’s not clear if Paramount or Sheridan clear the merch profits, Sheridan’s own Four Sixes Ranch vodka also receives promotional play on his shows, and the voluminous footage they offer of his ranch will not hurt its resale value. A cross section of Sheridan’s America — OK, snipers and oilmen — also down Michelob Ultra, an odd watery, low-carb choice for masters of various universes. (On Landman, Thornton’s Tommy is a recovering alcoholic who rationalizes Michelob Ultra does not violate his no-drinking code).
But what motivates that kind of ambition? Let’s ask Cara Dutton, the matriarch of 1923’s Yellowstone Ranch, played by Helen Mirren and written by Sheridan. One morning she watches her husband Jacob — played by promising newcomer Harrison Ford — as he shaves and muses about the latest trend of women shaving their legs and underarms. She wonders aloud what possessed a razor company to convince women they needed to smooth their skin.
“It’s greed,” says Cara. “What does that say about us as a species? It’ll be the thing that ends us. Greed will be the thing that kills us all.”
SHERIDAN’S LANDMAN, AN OIL SAGA starring Thornton and Jon Hamm, is filmed at a leisurely pace. Some scenes happen in real time for seemingly no reason other than to pad a tight six episodes to a more lucrative 10-episode run. (There is a “get on with it, already” pace to most of Sheridan’s shows). Still, there is some dramatic tension: the need to keep the oil flowing, no matter the human cost. On a related note, Sheridan’s overhead requires the same; there must always be product in the pipeline.
And that’s been a problem — well, at least for discerning, weak-kneed cosmopolitan viewers like me. Sheridan’s greatest creation of the past seven years was 1883, a Yellowstone prequel starring Tim McGraw and Faith Hill as the original Duttons making their way out West. What sets 1883 apart from the Sheridan pack is crisp storytelling — paying significant homage to Sheridan’s love of Larry McMutry’s Lonesome Dove along the way. In short, 1883 has a beginning and an end. The original Duttons are either going to make it to Montana, or they’re gonna die. (Spoiler alert: Most of them make it).
Sheridan’s cantering does allow for storytelling that is perfect for the Trump-Musk world: long monologues, mostly by men who see themselves as infallible truth-tellers. West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin’s shows were known for the walk and talk, but Sheridan favors the stop and talk, where one of his squinty-eyed, seen-it-all stand-ins launches into a speech. The lyrics change, but not the melody of Sheridan’s worldview: The past was better, the present is unbearable, and change is the enemy.
Across the Sheridan-verse, the soliloquies are delivered by a variety of players — ranch matriarchs, Mexican cartel kingpins, a Black statesman, a frozen-faced Nicole Kidman, and even a sadistic banker played by lesser James Bond Timothy Dalton. Despite their different creeds, genders, and timelines, it is all the standard white-guy lament, offering a unifying worldview with the cozy sameness of a pork chop entrée that can be ordered at a thousand Applebee’s.
Yellowstone’s John Dutton, played by Kevin Costner, is Sheridan’s OG no-change agent. In Season Five, Dutton, an amoral rancher, is elected governor of Montana. He doesn’t use his inaugural address to address the dreams of the children. Instead, he offers a statement of purpose that Bill O’Reilly could have delivered in 2004.
“I am the opposite of progress,” proclaims Dutton. “I am the wall it bashes against, and I will not be the one who breaks.”
Sheridan’s characters often reminisce about a time when everyone in America worked together toward a greater good. It was not that long ago. In Lioness, Morgan Freeman plays Secretary of State Edward Mullins, a Democrat with a heart of gold, who pops in to see his CIA Deputy of Operations, played grimly by Michael Kelly of House of Cards fame. The two have a sordid mission to coordinate, but first Mullins reflects on the good old days, namely 9/11 and George W. Bush.
“You will recall, there was some question about the legitimacy of the election of our 43rd president, so much so that we decided that his first term would be his only term,” says Mullins. “We stonewalled every appointment. Then, 9/11 and instantly everybody in the United States turned to him as our Commander in Chief. Say what you want about what he did after, but we needed a leader, and a leader arose.”
Mullins pauses and ponders the imponderable.
“What got us to where we are today?”
Well, you could argue that George Bush bullshitting us into Iraq got us on the road to where we are today, but Mullins has a different answer: The media fucked us.
“The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal — they stopped reporting the news and started telling us what they think the news is and what our opinion of that news should be. Americans have always been gullible, but they’re not stupid. Lie to them enough and they won’t trust you to tell them the sun’s rising.” (On Yellowstone, Sheridan has a New York City magazine writer come to Montana to investigate land shenanigans. She is strangled by a Dutton who gets away with it).
Perhaps Sheridan’s greatest magic trick occurs on Landman, where the adept acting of Billy Bob Thornton and Jon Hamm make the case that Thornton’s oil-field fixer and Hamm’s billionaire are the true American martyrs. Early in the show, Thornton’s Tommy takes a city slicker lady lawyer out into the oil fields. The lawyer spots a wind turbine and asks Tommy what is this monstrosity. (The fact that a lawyer doesn’t know what a wind turbine is in 2024 strains credulity.) Tommy pulls up to the behemoth and explains the petro facts of life in a speech that could have been cribbed from the American Petroleum Institute’s website.
“Do you have any idea how much diesel they have to burn to mix that much concrete?” (She does not!) “Or make that steel? And haul this shit out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to take a guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that fucking thing? Or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don’t get me started on solar panels or the lithium in your Tesla battery. And never mind the fact that if the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow, we wouldn’t have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities.”
The lawyer, played by Kayla Wallace, listens with the sorrowful look of a child who has burned down a Ronald McDonald house with her terminally ill brother inside. Somehow, Tommy is just getting started. He reminds her that oil is in everything from plastics to tires to antihistamines. And then comes the big finish.
“You know what the kicker is,” says Tommy. “We’re going to run out of it before we find its replacement. Getting oil out of the ground is the most dangerous job in the world. We don’t do it because we like it. We do it because we’ve run out of options. There ain’t nobody to blame but the demand that we keep pumping it.”
The lawyer has now been reduced to a human husk. Still, Sheridan climbs to the top rope again and drops another hammer shot. Suddenly, a rattlesnake appears at the lawyer’s feet. She is scared! Tommy gets a shovel and beheads alt energy — I mean, the rattler.
Unwittingly, the whole exchange echoes Mullins’ lament in Lioness about the media telling us what to believe. You might remember all the rending of garments when Kamala Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live and the MAGA world screamed that Trump deserves equal time. But one-sided storytelling gets its revenge on Sheridan’s shows, because man, there is information out there that rebuts the previous three minutes brought to you by your friends at Big Oil, including research that suggests a wind turbine actually offsets its energy cost in just 100 days and emits about 29 fewer tons of carbon dioxide in its lifetime as an oil well does. (This is a pretty good rebuttal.)
There’s no pushback or nuance; it’s just microwaved confirmation bias. It reminded me of something that Gene Hackman said in a 1996 Washington Post profile that resurfaced after his death. “There is some quote that people live their lives trying to change the world to fit their own prejudices,” said Hackman. “That’s kind of interesting. We all do that to some extent. We make the world the way we want it to be.”
WHILE SHERIDAN’S DUDES are mansplaining, most of his women are so far behind that I’m surprised he hasn’t created a show called 1963. In Yellowstone, Sheridan’s idea of a female heroine is Beth (Kelly Reilly), John Dutton’s daughter and wartime consigliere. Beth exists in an extreme DGAF world, even for melodrama. She starts bar fights, executes enemies by rattlesnake, and carries vodka in her purse. At first glimpse, she’s a welcome change in the pantheon of television, a female antihero. But Beth descends into camp as the series chugs onward. At one point, she proclaims, “You need to be closer when you look at me. I ruin careers for a living.”
In the end, Beth triumphs by murdering her brother Jamie in a gory knife fight that answers the question what would the world have looked like if Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction were more adept at blade play. Sheridan seems to be suggesting that a woman needs to be twice as sociopathic as a man to succeed in modern America.
Even when Sheridan does right by women, he does wrong by them. Sheridan’s 2016 film Wind River is particularly powerful in its account of sexual violence targeting Native Americans, and is one of many examples of Sheridan admirably and realistically portraying indigenous injustice in the white-man world. Of course, Sheridan, being Sheridan, pissed off the very same people when he claimed that Wind River was responsible for the passing of the Violence Against Women Act. “Taylor Sheridan’s attempt to take credit for the passage of VAWA is gross and completely discredits years of tireless advocacy from the Native community,” Native rights attorney Mary Kathryn Nagle posted on social media. “Sheridan should be apologizing, not taking credit for a victory secured by Indian Country advocates and led by Native women.”
He doesn’t always fail. On 1883, Elsa Dutton is a free-spirit teenager without a dark heart. She falls in love, rides bravely, and dies heroically, the best a woman can hope for in Sheridan’s world. Elements of her can be found on Lioness in Zoe Saldaña’s Joe McNamara, a CIA operative trying to save the world from the swarthy — terrorists in Season One, Mexican cartels in Season Two — while raising two girls. She has an infinitely patient surgeon husband whom she occasionally talks to over a bottle of wine as they dangle their feet in the pool at their stately D.C. home. McNamara kills bad guys by the score in a world off its axis while berating herself over neglecting her children, a lament that any modern parent can identify with. (Except for the part about calling in drone strikes).
Joe is also a mentor of sorts. She trains Cruz Manuelos, a young Marine, to be a lioness, a.k.a. a government-sanctioned murderer. Manuelos is expertly played by Laysla De Oliveira who, along with Saldaña, is at the top of the class of Sheridan’s actresses. That’s the good news. In Season One, Joe trains Cruz to befriend the daughter of a terrorist financier, infiltrate her world, and then kill her father. Complications arise when Cruz falls in love with the daughter. OK, lame plot device, but this is network television. Cruz returns in Season Two, where Joe wants her to watch over a female helicopter pilot who Joe needs to betray her drug kingpin dad. And… Cruz falls in love with the pilot. They talk about how they want to go to town on each other just before they fly a helo into a firefight.
I mean, people, what are we doing here? Sure, the material is not Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but it doesn’t seem too much to expect your female co-lead not to violate a key part of spycraft in her first two attempts.
Still, Saldaña and De Oliveira are Arya Stark and Mary Richards in comparison to the Landman women. The show gives an unsolicited glimpse of what The Dukes of Hazzard would have looked like if it had been on late-night Cinemax. Thornton’s Tommy has an ex-wife and a daughter who are seemingly characters plucked from dubious scenarios on PornHub. Michelle Randolph plays Ainsley Norris, Tommy’s 17-year-old nubile high school senior. (Randolph is 27.) In the pilot, Tommy asks Ainsley if she is having sex with her quarterback boyfriend. She says yes, but they are being careful: “We have a rule. As long as he never comes in me he can come anywhere on me.”
A quick consultation with my Texas-based friends tells me that 0.00 percent think it is realistic that a Texas belle would say this to her oilman father. More madness ensues from there. Ainsley moves into the McMansion that Tommy shares with two other fifty-ish oil guys. She proceeds to prance around the house in underwear and crop top, climbing on a stool to get something. The camera lingers, Three’s Company-style. And then her mom shows up. Angela Norris (played by Ali Larter) taunts Tommy, her ex, by FaceTiming with him and revealing she is wearing a bikini. (She does the same at a Texas country club before passing out from too much tequila.) Of course, Tommy takes Angela back, and now MILF and daughter are wearing tight clothes and doing aerobic activity in front of the goggle-eye oil guys back at the house.
“I’m never working a day in my life,” Angela tells Ainsley. “My only job is to make my man happy; then he will buy me the things that make me happy. I will reward him with sex. That’s the way the world works, honey.”
Well, that’s the way Sheridan’s world works for sure. Back on Lioness, a cartel murderer laments the Army in which his daughter served as a combat helicopter pilot.
“The Army does sensitivity training now. When I served, there was none of that shit.” A sneer never leaves his face. “There was no bathroom of the gender you decide you are today or any of that bullshit. Women and fags and fucking ladyboys and dykes. That’s our Army now.”
I guess the fact that the cartel guy’s daughter is a lesbian Army helicopter pilot creates tension and should persuade us this isn’t actually Sheridan’s viewpoint. I settled back on the couch and contemplated how he was going to end this fucker. Spoiler alert: Narco dad does not get his comeuppance. Instead, he beats the shit out of his daughter and gets a promotion courtesy of the CIA. Draw your own conclusions.
IT TURNS OUT THERE IS only one actor capable of defending the American Male Way in Sheridan’s world. That man? Taylor Sheridan.
Yes, the creator made the savior in his own image. In 2024, Sheridan cast himself not once, but twice, in parts that can best be described as the American male hero as douchebag; or, Dan Bongino. In Lioness, Sheridan plays Cody Spears, a black ops sharpshooter who bails out Joe McNamara with a kill count in the hundreds. And then there’s Travis, the loathsome but lovable — OK, only lovable to Sheridan — horse trader and rodeo star on Yellowstone. The last cowboy and the last sniper are pricks, but that’s how things get done.
Still, you can’t look away. Not for the usual reasons. No, it’s because the 54-year-old Sheridan is absolutely ripped, in an RFK Jr. kind of way. I’m not sure if in the history of the world an auteur has ever used his own body so unsubtly to make a point. In Sheridan’s world, the Last American Hero is he, and he will not cede ground to some millennial Buttigieg type.
And you may ask yourself, is Sheridan’s age-defying physique the product of his proudly red-meat diet and hours of daily exercise, because Sheridan has tons of free time? Who can say for sure? Well, OK, we can. (Sheridan’s shows don’t have Easter eggs as much as they have IEDs.) Early in Landman, Tommy, the show’s Sheridan stand-in, begins his day with cigarettes and a testosterone injection.
I LEFT THE FINAL SEASON of Yellowstone for last because of my affection for the show’s roots back in 2018 and my time with Sheridan in Utah. By now, it was pretty clear that Sheridan’s methods — like his fellow empire builder Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now — had become unsound. Still, I pressed on, well aware of the series’ late-season problems, namely Costner’s exiting after losing a dick-measuring contest to Sheridan over scheduling issues. (In a true sign that the Great American Man is out of ideas, Costner left to film Horizon: An American Saga, his own bloated take on the cowboy way, in the form of a four-part movie series.) I still wasn’t prepared.
Even though it was filmed before the 2024 election, Yellowstone’s last season reminded me of nothing more than the first DGAF month of Donald Trump’s second term. Sheridan’s Travis had played a peripheral part in earlier seasons of Yellowstone, but he steps to the forefront in the final episodes. Sheridan/Travis gets to announce the death of Costner/Dutton.
“John Dutton passed away,” Sheridan/Travis says. When asked the details, he replies, “I don’t know, does it matter?”
I guess not. Still, this is minor self-aggrandizement in comparison to the penultimate show of the series, when Dutton’s daughter Beth, fresh off the murder of her father, travels to Travis’ Texas ranch — Sheridan’s aforementioned spread — in hopes of convincing Travis to bring his rodeo show to Montana to help the Yellowstone sell horses in the family’s quixotic attempt to raise money to pay the ranch’s inheritance taxes.
Beth arrives just in time to see Travis and his muscles playing strip poker with his employees. She then observes him screwing over some Brazilian horse buyers. Later, Travis tells Beth the only way he will help her with the sale is if he can film her after she loses a strip poker hand. (Turns out he’s joking, what a mensch!)
At one point, Beth sidles up to Travis’ girlfriend Sadie, who is a quarter-century younger and played by, sigh, Bella Hadid. Beth asks Sadie what the hell she sees in him.
“You ever seen him ride before?”
The camera cuts to Travis playing a game of cat and mouse with a calf — Sheridan is a champion rodeo cutter in real life — expertly moving the junior bovine into capture position. (Somehow Sheridan found an eighth day of the week and has produced five seasons of a rodeo reality show about horse trainers called, uh, The Last Cowboy.)
Beth watches and purrs.
“OK, yeah I get it.”
The scene took me back to Utah and my time with Sheridan. One morning, I sat on an old white nag named Mr. Blue Jeans inside the fence of an indoor corral while Sheridan chased a wide-eyed calf around the ring, much like in the episode. He looked like a goddamn cowboy.
Then, something went wrong. The calf bolted away from Sheridan and headed straight for Mr. Blue Jeans. He sprinted under Jeans’ belly and then ricocheted off a fence.
The narcoleptic Mr. Blue Jeans barely moved. Sheridan rode over, his bravado gone.
“You know how lucky you are?” Sheridan told me. His face was gray. “Any other horse would have thrown you over the fence or pancaked you. Jesus, I’ve never seen that before.”
Sheridan was apologetic and wanted to buy me some cowboy boots as a mea culpa when we got back to town. We argued good naturedly over lunch and, like any decent beta male — the lowest of the low in Sheridan’s worlds — I surrendered. I lied that I really, really liked the $250 boots and wanted to buy them for myself.
I am looking at them now: For sale, cowboy boots never worn.
Mythology has its cost.