Taylor Sheridan thought he would end up working as a cowboy. Instead he writes about them for millions of TV viewers. Photo / AP
Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone is an enormous hit, and its success has positioned him to become one of TV's most prolific creators. Next up is a prequel series.
Before Taylor Sheridan became the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of the 2016 neo-Western Hell or High Water and co-creator (with John Linson) of the hit Paramount Network series Yellowstone, he spent nearly 20 years as a working actor, looking for jobs that called for a modern-day cowboy type. Sheridan grew up riding and roping in rural Texas, and before he got interested in showbiz, he assumed he'd be spending his life knocking around from ranch to ranch. Instead, he played tough guys and lawmen on TV.
Since moving behind the camera, Sheridan has tried to make sure the character actors who followed him would get to play more-complex tough guys and lawmen than he ever did. Beginning with his first produced screenplay, Sicario, Sheridan has told twisty crime stories set in jurisdictional gray areas, featuring hard-edged men and women fighting to protect their legacies.
Even the soapy drama Yellowstone — about the power struggles surrounding a sprawling Montana ranch — deals with the property disputes between lifelong ranchers, wealthy investors who want to turn the old spreads into high-end resorts and Indigenous people fighting to preserve the land as it was before America expanded west.
Yellowstone has become a phenomenal success for Paramount (although NBCUniversal's Peacock currently holds the streaming rights). Now in its fourth season, the show averages over 7 million same-day viewers an episode, outdrawing most network dramas. (That number climbs to 11 million per episode if you include a week of delayed viewing.)
The series gets hardly any critical attention, especially compared with chattering-class favourites such as Succession that inspire voluminous discussion while drawing a fraction of the audience that Yellowstone does. But its success has spurred Paramount's parent company, ViacomCBS, to develop more Sheridan series, including Mayor of Kingstown, a crime drama (created with Hugh Dillon) that premiered last month on the Paramount+ streaming service. Others in the works include a Yellowstone spinoff called 6666; a drama about Texas oil rigging titled Land Man; and another crime series, Kansas City, starring Sylvester Stallone.
Sheridan's newest show is another Yellowstone spinoff: 1883, is a prequel series that looks back at the history of the ranch. It follows James Dutton (Tim McGraw), his wife, Margaret (Faith Hill), and their grown daughter, Elsa (Isabel May), as they endure the dangers and discomforts of a wagon train heading from Texas to their new home in Montana.
While hustling to finish 1883, Sheridan spoke by phone about what he's trying to do with the series and with his career as a whole, which has been largely spent trying to expand his audience's understanding of cowboys and the American West. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q: Why make the first Yellowstone spinoff a prequel? And why set it so far in the past?
A: The pioneers have never been portrayed accurately. Many of the pioneers came from Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia, and they hired guides to take them west. They didn't speak the language. They'd never seen a horse. They'd never held a gun. And they had no idea that this land actually belonged to another group of people.
But Native Americans were not the greatest threat to the wagon trains. If you look at the leading cause of death along the trail, No. 1 one was falling off the wagon, No. 2 was disease, No. 3 was bandits. Native Americans were, like, sixth.
Q: Wagon-train and cattle-drive stories are staples of the Western genre. Do you have a favorite road-trip Western?
A: Lonesome Dove was extremely influential for me. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. I figured I'd eventually end up cowboying around somewhere. Before that, I figured I might as well either go to college or join the Army, and I really didn't want to join the Army. Then, two nights before I left for school, Lonesome Dove aired for the first time. I had read the book, and what they filmed was how I had imagined it. I said, "Now I know what I want to do: I want to do that."
Is this my version? Not intentionally, but I guess it can't help but be. While there are certainly romantic and poetic elements to this story, I'm trying real hard to show people what it was like. It was at times incredibly ugly and dangerous and harsh.
Q: You still hang out with cowboys. Do they watch a lot of Westerns?
A: Oh, it's all they watch. [Laughs.] Every cowboy I know has a copy of Lonesome Dove and has watched it 700 times. They don't watch anything but cowboys.
Q: You got your start in Hollywood as an actor on TV series like Sons of Anarchy and Veronica Mars. Did anyone on those shows become a mentor when you started writing your own screenplays?
A: Honestly? My mentor was Cormac McCarthy. My mentors were Larry McMurtry and Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez and John Steinbeck. All the writers who moved me.
I've never taken a screenwriting class in my life. Most of the television work I did was not very good. I never had a fancy agent, so I never got to read for the really good movies. When I quit acting and decided to tell my own stories, I had kept most of the scripts I auditioned for and a bunch of them that I'd done, so I sat down and spent about four days rereading them. I told myself, "OK, I have no idea how to do this, but I just spent four days reminding myself how not to."
Q: What did you take away from that? What are you aiming for with your work?
A: I hope it will be an honest reflection of the world and will feel authentic. I try to write dialogue I think is believable coming from people's mouths, but I also like it to be slightly elevated. I'm trying to make it sound a little timeless. When I write a screenplay, I try to write a book. When I shoot a TV show, I try to shoot a movie.
Q: Have you given much though to how long you want Yellowstone to run, given how popular it is?
A: Well, I know how it ends. I'm writing to that ending. There's only so much hovering one can do before the story starts to lose its locomotion; you can't put it in neutral just because it's successful. It will go as many years as it takes for me to tell the story, but you're not going to see nine seasons of it. No way.
Q: Do you see yourself continuing to do more things in that world, like 1883?
A: I don't limit myself. I'm drawn to the sparseness of the West because that's where I've spent most of my life. I lived in New York for a while. I enjoyed my time there, but I would be an outsider writing about it. I like being outdoors. I really like using the camera as a paintbrush, and I just find it's so rare that you get to see the vastness of this nation. For the time being, that's what fascinates me the most.
Q: There are some common themes in your scripts. Yellowstone is about powerful landowners and Hell or High Water is about two guys barely scraping by, yet both are about people terrified of losing some part of their legacy. Why do you like to keep telling that story?
A: I don't know if it's a uniquely American fear or just a human fear: the fear that a way of life is ending. I haven't spent enough time anywhere else to know. But it's what drives our politics right now. I think it's a massive theme, this fear of losing someone that you love or a place that you love. That's pretty universal.
Q: Does it surprise you, given how popular Yellowstone is, that it's not written about more? It doesn't pop up much in awards conversations or on critics' lists.
A: Oh, I don't care about it. [Laughs.] I don't care if critics hate it and I don't care if they like it. I'm not resentful. I just simply do not care. I'm not making it for them; I'm making it for people who live that life. The audience has expanded beyond that because, you know, a lot of people love Westerns.
I think one of the reasons the critics haven't responded to Yellowstone is that I'm breaking a lot of story rules. I'll jump the plot ahead for no reason whatsoever except that I wanted to and it's entertaining. The people who get it eat it up, and the people that try to look at it with a critical eye see a mess.
But that's what I love about Yellowstone, the way that it flows from being campy to melodramatic to intensely dramatic to violent. It's every old Western and new Western and soap opera thrown together in a blender. And yes, I think it infuriates and confounds some people who study storytelling. They don't understand why this thing's such a hit.
Here's why: It's wickedly acted and the location is fantastic, and we're peeking into a world that no one really knows. I am chewing the scenery and having a blast doing it, and the actors are having a blast as well. It is powerhouse actors getting to say some real chewy stuff.
Q: Is it trickier these days to make Westerns, given how closely people pay attention to cultural representation in media? You certainly haven't shied away from telling stories about both immigrants and Indigenous people.
A: Ultimately, what one has to ask is: What story are you telling and why are you telling it? If you hold the mirror up to the world and reflect it back accurately, who cares what other people think? You have to tell the stories that matter to you. I have the freedom to do that, constitutionally, and so I will.
I go into these things agenda-less, and I get it from both sides. Some people watch Yellowstone and complain that it's a red-state show. And then the other half thinks I'm a commie if one of my characters is an animal-rights activist. For me, it's just the world: Here it is.
I can't stand to pay money or give time to a thing that tells me how to think, even if I agree with it. Social change comes from the arts, yes, but it comes from discussion. Art is supposed to spark the dialogue that affects the change. I try to present both sides, even the sides I don't agree with.
With Westerns, we have to be able to look to our past, and yes, to question. But not everything that happened in the United States from the first time a Western European got here is a tragedy. There were tragedies and there were triumphs, on every side. History is never as clean as we try to make it in the retelling. I like to let my retelling be dirty.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Noel Murray
Photographs by: Saeed Rahbaran
© 2021 THE NEW YORK TIMES
The HBO new series set 10,000 years before the feature films, Dune: Prophecy is screening on Neon from November 18. Video / Sky TV