You know Taylor Sheridan, right? The super-prolific writer, producer, and director? The man behind Yellowstone, Landman, Tulsa King, and about a half-dozen other violently macho prestige TV dramas that your red-state uncles love? Here’s a thought experiment: Based on what you know, take a moment to imagine what a vegan, nonbinary college student might be like in a Sheridan show. Got the image?
Guess what: You’re probably right. The penultimate episode of Landman’s second season introduced the cartoonishly joyless new character Paigyn Meester, the Texas Christian University roommate of the bubbly blonde cheerleader Ainsley Norris. In Paigyn’s first few minutes onscreen, they declare that they (deep breath) dislike music, own a smelly pet ferret, refuse to allow any meat products in the dorm, despise the chemical blast of Ainsley’s various perfumes, and find her use of phallic imagery “triggering.”And that’s just Paigyn’s introduction. As for what happens next…well, I’ll get back to that. But I will say that if you can’t predict Paigyn’s Landman arc, maybe you don’t know Sheridan as well as you think.
I’ve been writing about Sheridan’s movies and TV series off and on for about a decade now. I’ve written about Yellowstone, Mayor Of Kingstown, 1883, Tulsa King, Landman and Lawman: Bass Reeves for outlets as varied as Vulture, The Chron, The Daily Beast, Time, and this very website. I even got to interview Sheridan once for The New York Times.
And after hours upon hours spent watching and thinking about Sheridan’s work, I still couldn’t tell you anything definitive about his politics. By which I mean: I couldn’t say with any degree of certainty who he voted for in the last presidential election. Judging by his movies and TV series alone (since he prefers not to talk much to the press), I only have some idea of his worldview—which isn’t quite the same as knowing whether he supports Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, or what have you.
Sheridan, to me, fits in with a group of showbiz types, comedians and “thought leaders” that includes the likes of Bill Maher, Dave Chappelle, and Aaron Sorkin, among way too many others. (Jon Stewart, depressingly, has lately entered these ranks.) These are the Smugly World-Weary Know-It-Alls, who position themselves at a safe remove from the fray, claiming that this allows them to see our current situation with clearer eyes than most. Often, these folks mainly socialize with other Smugly World-Weary Know-It-Alls, who share their passion for “tut-tut”-ing about The State Of Things and believe that observing a problem is the same as doing something.
It’s easy to confuse the Know-It-Alls with centrists, given that they make jabs at right-wingers and leftists with equal zeal. But the term “centrist” implies some rudimentary interest in actual policy—even if it’s just to stand between the faction that says “all babies should eat” and the faction that says “babies should be ripped from their parents’ arms and deported to El Salvador” and meekly say, “Surely there’s some middle ground here.” The Know-It-Alls aren’t seeking solutions to social ills. They’re watchers, not arbiters.
Does Sheridan care about any issues in particular? Based on his work, it seems so. He may be an environmentalist—to a degree. He’s shown compassion for the struggles of Indigenous peoples. He respects the military and some law enforcement. He’s suspicious of bankers, brokers, lawyers, and real-estate developers.
Nevertheless, Know-It-All-ism has shaded Sheridan’s scripts from the beginning. Before Yellowstone, Sheridan made his reputation with screenplays for three critically acclaimed movies (one of which he also directed); and while all three feature punchy dialogue and a refreshing frankness about the increasing hardness of American life, they’re also suffused with resigned despair.
The Cannes-anointed, Oscar-nominated 2015 thriller Sicario set this tone. Sicario puts the viewer in the boots of an FBI special agent played by Emily Blunt, as her mission to quash cartel activity along the Arizona border drags her into a moral quagmire. She’s drafted into a world where everyone’s at least a little bit corrupt and where extrajudicial killings are common. Gradually, she realizes that even the “good guys” in the American and Mexican governments are only trying to control drug trafficking, not stop it.
On one level, Sicario comes across as a scathing indictment of the ineffectuality and cynicism of America’s modern criminal justice system. But in retrospect—and seen in the context of Sheridan’s other projects—Sicario looks less an expression of outrage than an exhausted shrug capped by an extended “well, what are you gonna do?” sigh. It’s an attempt to raise awareness, not a call for change.
Another Sheridan-penned film charmed Cannes and the Oscars the following year: Hell Or High Water, which garnered even better reviews than Sicario. Ostensibly the story of two bank-robbing brothers and the aging Texas Ranger trying to catch them, the movie functions as both an exciting, surprising neo-Western and a modern-day Robin Hood tale, in which the thieves aim to punish the greedy bankers who are trying to seize their family’s ranch. But the big difference between these guys and Robin Hood—again, more relevant given Sheridan’s later work—is that they’re not trying to feed the poor, just their own kin.
The last film in what the writer dubbed his “American Frontier Trilogy” was 2017’s Sheridan-directed Wind River, which debuted at Sundance, played Cannes, and again became a respectable box-office hit—although its reviews fell from the Outright Rave level of Sicario and Hell Or High Water to something more like Modest Recommendation.
Wind River may be the project that best defines what Sheridan’s about. The film splits the difference between Sicario and Hell Or High Water. It’s another neo-Western, about another FBI agent (played by Elizabeth Olsen) getting schooled on the complexities of crime and punishment in a forbidding corner of America. In this case, the tutor is U.S. Wildlife Agent Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), a broken man who has a hard time believing his government suddenly cares about the rapes and murders of Indigenous women.
Nevertheless, Lambert leads his guest through the snowy Wyoming mountains, teaching her—and by extension the audience—about the local problems with poverty, drug dens, and predators both animal and human. The ratio of speechifying to pulp thrills is skewed higher toward the former than in the two previous Sheridan-written films (the ones he didn’t direct); and again, there’s a suggestion by the end of the film that the best a person can hope for in this violent, unjust world is some small measure of personal closure, not any kind of systemic overhaul.
It’s worth noting some of the offscreen hubbub around Wind River, which may have misled people into pegging Sheridan as a bleeding heart. Sheridan made a point of having The Weinstein Company’s name removed from the movie’s credits in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Years later, Sheridan claimed in a Hollywood Reporter interview that the film was directly responsible for a change in the law regarding violence against women in Indigenous communities. He assumed the mantle of the crusader. “All social change begins with the artist, and that’s the responsibility you have,” he declared. But what does that responsibility actually entail? Being actively engaged with the world? Or just pointing fingers, while sitting alone at a laptop on a cattle ranch?
As I mentioned, Sheridan hasn’t talked much to the press in the years since Yellowstone made him a mogul. Whenever he has, he’s been prone to a kind of self-promotion verging on self-mythologizing. In that same Hollywood Reporter interview, he told Yellowstone’s origin story in a way that framed him as a bold visionary, shrugging off the demands and advice of the coastal showbiz elites. When I interviewed him, I asked a question about his early years in Hollywood—when he worked as an actor on shows like Veronica Mars and Sons Of Anarchy—expecting him to give some credit to a mentor or two. Instead, he told me he used the scripts for the episodes he acted in as lessons in what not to do.
Yellowstone changed the public perception of Sheridan. While before he’d been pegged as a talented genre screenwriter with an anti-authoritarian bent, the raging success of his first TV series recast him as a Red State Whisperer, giving an underserved audience of conservatives their own Succession to obsess over. He solidified his empire with two Yellowstone prequels (the miniseries 1883 and 1923), made while he was also overseeing Mayor Of Kingstown (a pre-Yellowstone project he dusted off once he could control how it was made) and Tulsa King (a lighter crime series he originally intended to hand off to another showrunner before becoming frustrated with that process).
Sheridan has said—to me, in fact—that he sees a difference between the pulpy pop entertainment of something like Yellowstone and Mayor Of Kingstown and projects like Wind River and 1883 that he hopes will be taken more seriously. But thematically, they’re all of a piece. The moment that Sheridan created Yellowstone’s John Dutton, he established his ur-hero: a wizened crank trying to protect his family’s holdings and traditions from all the activists and opportunists trying to chip away at them.
The John Dutton type keeps recurring in Sheridan’s shows. In Tulsa King, it’s Sylvester Stallone’s Dwight Manfredi, an old mafia soldier trying to bring time-tested values and methods to a wide-open Oklahoma. In Landman, it’s Billy Bob Thornton’s Tommy Norris, an oil-industry lifer who’s seen too much tragedy and venality to have much optimism for the future of his business. In Lioness, the grizzled grump is a woman: Joe McNamara (Zoe Saldaña), a CIA handler running a team of undercover female agents and making sure they don’t let their personal feelings interfere with the mission.
All of these Sheridan protagonists are united by a sense of duty, a pervasive pessimism, and more than a little self-righteous snobbery. I don’t mean “snob” in the “wealthy elite who looks down on the commoners” sense, but more like “people who can’t wait for others to make a mistake so they can say ‘I told you so.’” Landman’s Tommy often seems to get his only enjoyment in life out of telling people exactly how they goofed up—especially if it involves explaining to some huffy environmentalist that, yes, the oil industry is destroying the planet, but no, it can never be replaced.
To me, the most fascinating Sheridan character in this regard is Mike McLusky, the self-appointed “mayor” of Mayor Of Kingstown, played by Wind River’s Renner. Set in a hardscrabble Michigan city where the three main employers are the prison, the police department, and the local drug dealers, Mayor Of Kingstown is about a man whose family has long served as mediators between the town’s big bosses. Mike has no official powers. He just tries to make sure that the ongoing criminal operations in Kingstown keep violence in the streets to a minimum. More often than not, Mike fails spectacularly, and dozens of people die. Yet at no point in the show’s four seasons (a fifth and final is on the way) has this led Mike to change tactics and start working to eliminate trafficking altogether.
See the thread here? Whether it’s Tommy in Landman scoffing at renewables, Joe in Lioness urging her squad to cozy up to and then betray their targets, or Mike in Mayor Of Kingstown aiming to pick the right drug lord to peddle poison (like the government agents in Sicario), a recurring theme in Sheridan’s stories is that only rubes believe in making the world a better place. The truly enlightened just try to manage the mayhem.
Honestly, this is a lot of what makes Sheridan’s shows so appealing—at least on the surface. They seem to present a savvy picture of life as it’s actually lived, full of compromises and capitulations on the big issues, coupled with fierce resistance to small changes. Like John Dutton and the brothers in Hell Or High Water, most Sheridan heroes have a stubborn, almost irrational devotion to their friends and families—and to the lives they’ve always known—that doesn’t extend to society as a whole.
This is also what makes his shows ultimately unsatisfying as stories. Because his protagonists are incapable of truly changing—since changing would negate the Know-It-All principals for which they stand. The central characters of Yellowstone and Mayor Of Kingstown just repeat themselves, season after season. Conflicts are resolved and reset, without any lessons learned. I’m not saying Sheridan should tell us what to think about controversial social issues, or that his shows should offer a set of attainable action items. I understand that he’s making pop art, not staging a rally. But drama does usually involve some catharsis, which Sheridan’s protagonists rarely experience. They don’t evolve.
His minor characters do, though. Which brings us back to Paigyn. After one of the worst introductions in TV history, Paigyn returns later in that same Landman episode, as Ainsley’s mother Angela comes roaring into the dorm room to spirit her daughter away to a nearby hotel, while pointedly lecturing Paigyn about the importance of making friends. In the next episode, we see Paigyn—working in their capacity as the cheerleading team’s athletic trainer—giving Ainsley advice about hydration and protecting her ankles. Ainsley later defends Paigyn from some bigoted local teens. The two roomies reconcile, agreeing to be more tolerant of each other. Isn’t that nice?
Actually, this switcheroo isn’t that uncommon for a Taylor Sheridan drama. As much as his heroes may mock do-gooders and scolds, they do have a rudimentary commitment to comity. After all, you don’t get to be a Smugly World-Weary Know-It-All without listening to the people who disagree with you. How else can you explain how they’re wrong?
Noel Murray is a contributor to The A.V. Club.
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