Taylor Sheridan is making some of today’s best TV – and he’s just getting started

Along with Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues), Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing), David Chase (The Sopranos), David Simon (The Wire) and Amy Sherman-Palladino (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), Taylor Sheridan deserves a place on any list of the leading lights of American TV over the past 50 years. And he’s really only just begun.

A born-and-bred Texan, the 52-year-old started out as a jobbing actor with noteworthy supporting roles on Veronica Mars (2005-2007, Stan*) and Sons of Anarchy (2008-2010, Disney+, Binge, Foxtel Now). Since then, he’s taken on bit parts as cowboys in several of the productions he’s written and/or directed: Hell or High Water (2016, Stan), directed by David Mackenzie, Yellowstone (2018-2022, Stan), and 1883 (2021-2022, Paramount+).

Now, in addition to owning ranches in Texas (one for horses, the other for cattle), he’s become a major player in the business, with his unofficial repertory company pointing to both his commitment to teamwork and his loyalty to those who have collaborated with him over the years. Among them are: producer Art Linson and his producer-writer son, John; cinematographer-directors Ben Richardson and Christina Alexandra Voros; director Stephen Kay; actor-writer Hugh Dillon, and actors Gil Birmingham, Jeremy Renner, Kelsey Asbille, Tokala Black Elk, Martin Sensmeier and Brisbane-born teenager Finn Little.

Evident in everything that Sheridan has done – all of it currently available through the streaming services – is his concern for the circumstances of the disenfranchised, in particular America’s First Nations peoples, his ambivalent embrace of “the cowboy code” and his love for the land. Also noteworthy is the bleak view of contemporary America that emerges through it. For Sheridan, the “United States” are anything but. Rather, they make up a divided nation with a present that’s just as troubled and lawless as its past.

Kevin Costner and Luke Grimes in Yellowstone.Credit: Danno Nell

Most of the films and TV series he’s worked on have been set more or less in the present. His Yellowstone prequel, the epic 1883 (2021-2022, Paramount+), is his only straight historical piece, a wagon-train western that mourns the displacement of the Indigenous owners of the land even if it’s also infused with the dreams of white America.

But the moral landscapes of everything that he’s done have been moulded out of his interactions with the westerns of yore. They are places where the struggle to survive is all and men and women have to decide for themselves what’s right and what’s not.

At the same time as 1883’s opening sequence provides a tantalising harbinger of what’s to come, it also lays the foundations for Sheridan’s subversion of the kinds of clichés that have afflicted too many of those westerns. In it, white pioneers following the Oregon Trail across the Great Plains – they’re mostly émigrés from Germany – are under attack by a small band of Lakota Braves. It’s the kind of violent raid we’ve seen many times before courtesy of Old Hollywood.

In a smoke-shrouded wide shot that maintains a relatively discreet distance but is still shocking, a fleeing, long-haired woman is chased down and, while still alive, scalped by one of the band, who then turns to his comrades proudly holding aloft his prize.

Nearby on the brutal battlefield, the film’s narrator and central character, 18-year-old Elsa Dutton (Isabel May), is fighting for her life. A wagon is ablaze in the background. The white menfolk are elsewhere. And we have to wait until the series’ second-last episode – where the cliché evoked by the attack on the pioneers is brilliantly turned on its head – for an explanation of their absence and for the sequence’s aftermath.

Colton (Noah Le Gros), an amiable cowboy hired by the pioneers, is the first of them to arrive back at the scene. He finds the scalped woman still alive, but bleeding, out of her mind, and slowly dying a horrible death. They’re alone in the middle of nowhere, a beautiful but utterly inhospitable landscape. “The land of no mercy” is how Elsa describes it. Medical assistance is a lifetime away. Hating what he is about to do, Colton takes out his gun and puts her out of her agony.

Tim McGraw as James and Faith Hill as Margaret in a scene from 1883. Credit: Emerson Miller/Paramount+

When Shea Brennan (Sam Elliott), the wagon master, arrives, he finds a despairing Colton tormented by the life-ending decision he’s made, unable to reconcile what he’s done with any notion of civilisation. A captain in the Union Army during the Civil War – which ended on the day Elsa was born – Shea has seen it all before. “What’s decent out here? What’s the gauge?” he asks the desperate Colton, before providing the only possible answer: “You’re the gauge.”

In varying degrees of dramatic intensity, that exchange lies at the heart of all of Sheridan’s work. It’s crucial to virtually everything that happens in 1883, which not only builds a poignant family history for the Duttons of Yellowstone but also implicitly identifies what’s gone missing between the generations: the decency that Shea was alluding to.

In 1883, as the pioneers are confronted by one obstacle after another, they’re constantly forced to ponder impossible options. What’s the right thing to do when, as Elsa’s mother (Faith Hill) warns her daughter, “every choice has fangs”? Should her husband (Tim McGraw), a man of principle, put his family first, or the plight of their fellow travellers? In the western, everyone has to fend for themselves, inventing the rules on the run, and the consequences make it difficult to distinguish between what’s right and what ain’t.

Benicio Del Toro in Sicario: Day of the Soldado and, Emily Blunt (right) in the original Sicario.Credit: Richard Foreman, Jr./Sony Pictures, Roadshow Films

It’s the same throughout Sheridan’s work. In Yellowstone, which is set in present-day Montana, the law is either corrupt or incompetent. This leaves the rival landowners – rancher John Dutton (Kevin Costner), Indian reservation boss Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) and the property developers trying to expand their realm – to take matters into their own hands. The same goes for the underhand activities of the covert FBI team in the superb Sicario (2015, Stan), directed by Denis Villeneuve and based on Sheridan’s first-produced screenplay, and its visceral, Sheridan-written sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018, Apple, rental), directed by Stefano Sollima.

The law is also an irrelevance in The Mayor of Kingstown (2021-2022, Paramount +, recently renewed for a second season), as Renner’s self-appointed middle-man, an ex-con, negotiates the terms of the peace between the conflicting gangs making up the inmates of the town prisons, the guards who watch over them and the local police.

Jeremy Renner (centre) plays Mike, a self-appointed middle-man and ex-con who negotiates peace between prison inmates and guards in Mayor of Kingstown.Credit: Paramount+

Not everything that bears Sheridan’s name as a writer or director is likely to stand the test of time. Sicario: Day of the Soldado runs out of puff in the final 30 minutes; Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021, Netflix, Foxtel Now) is an efficient but dramatically slight reworking of aspects of the superior Wind River (2017, Stan, Binge, Foxtel Now); the finally ludicrous Without Remorse (2021, Prime), also directed by Sollima, perfunctorily returns to the high-level treacheries of Sicario; and Yellowstone loses some of its urgency after season two. But Sheridan has crammed a lot of impressive work into the seven years since Sicario.

And there’s more to come. Yellowstone’s fifth season premieres globally on November 14. A planned and approved sequel to 1883, entitled 1932, “will follow a new generation of Duttons during the time of Western expansion, Prohibition and the Great Depression”. Currently in pre-production is Lioness, a new series Sheridan has created with actress-producer Jill Wagner, set to star Zoe Saldana.

He’s also in pre-production on two further TV series, Tulsa King, a mob thriller starring the 75-year-old Sylvester Stallone, and Land Man, an oil rig drama set in West Texas and starring Billy Bob Thornton. Then there’s the feature, Fast, a crime thriller he’s written and Gavin O’Connor is set to direct. And he’s developing yet another Yellowstone spin-off entitled 6666 after the ranch where Jimmy (Jefferson White) goes to learn how to be a “real cowboy” in the fourth series of Yellowstone. So stay tuned.

*Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.

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