Taylor Sheridan, American Conqueror

Photo: Paramount Network

On the surface, it appeared to be a tough year for Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone+ universe. The final season of his landmark series lost its big star — seemingly along with Sheridan’s own enthusiasm — and, as its ancillary series expanded, his domain seemed to move further away from the rolling vistas of Montana. Yet, Yellowstone’s finale reportedly drew in over 11 million viewers, an all-time high for the series. Meanwhile, Paramount+ claims that Landman, Sheridan’s latest project, is now its biggest original scripted series. Why does Sheridan’s work endure? The conversation around this question tends to assume a political dimension almost by default. Take your pick of explanation: how his shows feed scores of red-state or flyover-country viewers historically overlooked by the liberal Hollywood elite; how they’re fluent in the language of the culture war; how Sheridan’s hard-to-pin-down politics means he draws eyeballs from both sides of the aisle. The sheen of politics might be the X factor that makes his shows such a potent topic of discussion, but the thing that keeps people coming back has always been far more banal.

Do you know what Sheridan is pretty good at? Making dumb, fun genre shows that are heavy on vibes and generally proficient with mechanics. When Sheridan is in his bag, you’re watching competently executed genre television supercharged by a bigger-than-average budget. Lioness, for example, is in many ways a standard-issue spy show, but it’s elevated by frequent action set pieces that wouldn’t look out of place in a feature film. It’s quality boy stuff: Things blow up; bullets go pew, pew, pew; and Nicole Kidman stomps around slinging tough-guy zingers. (“Don’t fucking ‘ma’am’ me.”) Yellowstone prequels 1883 and 1923 provide the pleasures of sumptuously realized Westerns in the traditional sense: men in cowboy hats riding horses and shooting guns amid a stark landscape. Landman, roughly a Friday Night Lights–style drama, is propelled by the rhythms of watching charismatic leading man Tommy Norris, played by Billy Bob Thornton, bumping around West Texas in his pickup truck and solving problems. Tulsa King and Mayor of Kingstown are basically Sheridan’s take on a Sopranos-esque mob dramedy and a David Simon-ish high-minded crime thriller, respectively; both are built around tough-guy leads navigating problems in gritty, complicated corners of “Middle America.” (That is, Oklahoma and Michigan.)

Sheridan writes soap operas: melodramatic, outrageous, emotional, big. More specifically, he writes soap operas for men. They are typically set in predominantly male worlds with traditionally masculine archetypes at the center: cowboys, ranchers, intelligence operatives, mobsters, fixers, oilmen. This mixture of soapy and manly is the quality that makes the Sheridan-verse so weird and interesting as a cultural artifact; its popularity could reflect its efficacy in helping masculine men satisfy their need to feel big feelings about the world. This consumer value proposition is further bolstered by the consistency of the Taylor Sheridan experience, for which there is a discernible formula: Take a setting you don’t typically see rendered with much specificity elsewhere on television, layer onto it a patina of a political idea, populate it with characters who talk and cuss in the same way, and then adjust the whole mix to fit the mold of different genres.

Sheridan’s shows tend to be uncommonly good at communicating a sense of place. Few things on television look quite as vivid as Montana does in Yellowstone, from its sweeping landscapes to how particularly shitty its cookie-cutter hotel bars feel, or the depiction of the great American expanse of 1883. The Midland, Texas, of Landman is persistently bathed in sweat and sweltering yellow light, and if you squint, there’s a sly story being told in the contrast between the extravagantly bland McMansion Tommy rents and the outrageously gauche McMansion occupied by his independent oil-tycoon boss Monty, played by Jon Hamm. Sheridan’s dialogue may be too circular, too repetitive, too filled with testosteronic bullshit and soft misogyny, but his scripts always provide opportunities for the production of striking images. Landman’s pilot, for example, ends with an oil-pump explosion that narratively functions as a shock cliffhanger, but the towering inferno it leaves behind is an indelible picture, horrific and beautiful.

The impulse to emphasize politics when interpreting the Sheridan-verse’s popularity is understandable. He has a background of writing politically twinged thrillers (Sicario, Hell or High Water, Wind River, all unambiguously good movies) that share fairly vague yet provocative values: a belief in the law being incompatible with actual justice, an interest in the symbolism of land and spaces beyond major urban cities, and general skepticism of the state and its bureaucracy. Sheridan has an affinity for writing characters who have lots of big things to say about the world around them and their place in it; Yellowstone features hours of John Dutton solemnly orating on the subject of Montana, the ranching way of life, and the threat posed by outside interlopers. It’s hard not to read something in the speech he gives when he wins the Montana gubernatorial race at the top of the fifth season: “I am the opposite of progress. I am the wall it bashes against, and I will not be the one who breaks.” Landman, set in the oil fields of West Texas, is punctuated by extensive diatribes from Tommy about the oil industry’s importance, the tragic necessity of landmen and roughnecks, and the fallacy of placing society’s hope on renewable energy. (These monologues are, in a way, the Sheridanean equivalent of an “I Want” song in a Broadway musical.)

But as Sheridan has risen in stature and become increasingly stretched thin across projects, his scripts have grown sloppier (a standard episode of Landman is roughly 30 percent plot and 70 percent vibes, where nothing really happens), so it’s hard not to interpret any of his characters’ extensive monologues as a vessel for the guy’s own beliefs. However, within the engine of his shows, those messages can never be properly explored or interrogated because Sheridan’s television empire is such that things need to constantly keep moving. Lioness has to move to the next explosive set piece, and Yellowstone has to figure out what the hell to do with the Duttons next. Yet the threadbare nature of these scripts allow his actors to run wild with their performances (see Kelly Reilly’s Beth Dutton as the prototypical case), making way for wacky, melodramatic emotions you can’t help but get swept up in.

We’re still rolling off a presidential election cycle that highlighted how most Americans don’t operate from a clear or coherent ideology. Sheridan’s loudly felt political vagueness, then, broadly matches this reality. In many ways, his closest analogue is the similarly ubiquitous and controversial Ryan Murphy. Despite their superficial differences in political aesthetics, both write series that allow their performers to go big and keep audiences tuning in for more. If the Murphy-verse is any indication, Sheridan’s empire can only grow, with more genres and lands rising up for him to conquer.