Nearly every TV show that Taylor Sheridan has ever produced has been, in essence, a crime drama. Whether he’s writing about ranchers, rodeo riders, or roughnecks, Sheridan tends to see the world as a place of scarce and dwindling resources, fought over constantly by the people clinging stubbornly to what they have and the ones desperate to wrest it away. Often, both sides are outlaws.
Sheridan first began selling this stark vision of American life to millions of weekly viewers with his flagship series Yellowstone, a modern western splattered with violence and littered with corpses. When it debuted in 2018, Yellowstone was pitched as a modern-day Dallas crossed with Bonanza: the soapy saga of a rich and powerful Montana ranching family, at war with each other as much as with the many, many factions trying to carve up their land. The first episode ended with a deadly shoot-out. After that, throughout the first season, whenever the story started sagging, Sheridan would drop a few more bodies.
So it’s gone with Sheridan’s television output ever since. Some of his shows are overtly about gangsters and drug dealers, like Tulsa King and Mayor of Kingstown. But even his newest series, Landman, which is ostensibly about the oil business in southwest Texas, features Mexican cartels and inconvenient cadavers. It’s a big reason why his shows are hits: Crime pays.
It’s not the only reason, though. As a screenwriter, Sheridan has three main gifts. He writes lively dialogue, punctuated with vivid turns of phrase and colorful profanity (and, yes, more than a little purple prose). He creates larger-than-life characters, who shoulder heavy responsibilities in jobs that in many cases are essential to the American way of life. And he knows how to combine those first two gifts in bold, provocative (and sometimes heavy-handed) speeches that challenge how viewers think about big topics, like who gets to own land in this country and what they should be allowed to do with it.
Because of that latter preoccupation, Sheridan is often pegged as catering to red-state audiences — especially with Yellowstone, which has become a phenomenon among the kinds of TV viewers who love country music and hate government overreach. But anyone who pays close attention to his shows should see that his politics aren’t so easy to pin down. In fact, before Yellowstone premiered, it wasn’t touted as right-wing escapism but rather as the latest project from a promising young writer and director who had worked on a few punchy, critically acclaimed action-adventure movies. After spending about 20 years as a character actor — most notably in recurring roles on Veronica Mars and Sons of Anarchy — Sheridan wrote the 2015 drug-war thriller Sicario, followed closely by the 2016 crime-spree drama Hell or High Water and then by the 2017 neo-western Wind River, which he also directed. Each of these movies was smart, exciting, and relevant to the present moment, with a point of view that centered the daily struggles of ordinary folks.
That populism has remained central to Sheridan’s point of view, even though many of his protagonists are like Yellowstone’s John Dutton (Kevin Costner): a man who has commanded his own private armies and dictated orders to the local government. One of the odder quirks of Sheridan’s shows is that while they’re admirably attuned to the ways money can buy influence and security, he also recognizes that the mega-wealthy can be hard to root for. So his characters are often very rich yet also always somehow on the brink of total financial ruin.
This is far from Sheridan’s only weakness as a writer-producer (and occasional director). He struggles to write women who aren’t either curvier versions of men or untamed, unknowable creatures of whim. His dialogue sometimes veers towards the clunky, or worse. And while he can be at writing quiet little scenes where people work side by side and share their thoughts about life, he rarely stacks those scenes together into anything resembling a well-thought-out, surprising, suspenseful narrative.
Despite those flaws — or heck, perhaps because of them, to some extent — over the past eight years, Sheridan has become a successful TV brand, on a par with Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy. He has put his name on nine shows so far, many of which he has written mostly by himself, eschewing the conventional “writers’ room” approach to making television. (At one point in the fall of 2024, five of those shows had seasons airing.) These series are, for better or for worse, rich with personal feeling and idiosyncrasy in ways the committee-shaped, risk-averse world of TV rarely is.
With Landman having debuted last night (and both Yellowstone and Lioness currently on the air), here’s a look at Sheridan’s entire TV career to date, from his weakest series to his strongest.
The Last Cowboy (2019–present)
The lone nonfiction series on Sheridan’s résumé (so far) is a real passion project for him, reflecting a love for the fairly niche equestrian sport of “reining,” which involves guiding a speedy horse through tight turns and sudden stops. The Last Cowboy’s five six-episode seasons follow the major events and characters of the reining year, culminating in a championship with a million-dollar payout. The show has more in common with dishy behind-the-scenes sports docs like Hard Knocks and Drive to Survive than with competition series like Top Chef and Project Runway. That’s a problem, because the emphasis on minor personality conflicts between the riders feels contrived, especially given that all these folks seem to be as nice as they are talented. So while the photography is lovely and the horses are impressive, the show devolves into hour after hour of similar scenes and bland drama.
Lawmen: Bass Reeves (2023)
The first of what might end up being a series of miniseries about real-life lawmen, Bass Reeves is the rare Sheridan-produced show that doesn’t have his name in the credits as a writer or director. Although the showrunner Chad Feehan maintains the grim worldview and eruptive violence that are Sheridan’s hallmarks, what’s missing are the flashes of humor and the lovingly crafted, lived-in spaces that make a Sheridan show so inviting. David Oyelowo is excellent as always, playing a man who escaped slavery and later became a U.S. marshal. But the miniseries’ simultaneously episodic and sweeping approach to Reeves’s life ends up feeling both rushed and disconnected. The basic approach is “Here’s a bunch of stuff that may or may not have actually happened, presented in roughly chronological order.” Given the subject and the powerhouse cast (which also includes Shea Whigham, Dennis Quaid, Barry Pepper, and Donald Sutherland), Lawmen should’ve been much stronger.
Tulsa King (2022–present)
This modernized mob tale started strong in its first season, introducing a more comic character than is common for a Sheridan production: Dwight “The General” Manfredi (Sylvester Stallone), a former mafia captain who gets released from prison after two decades and is reassigned to Oklahoma with vague instructions to “earn.” Surprised by the proliferation of marijuana dispensaries, Dwight tries to engineer an illegal takeover of a legal business, all while being closely watched by federal authorities and rival gangsters.
Boardwalk Empire creator and frequent Sopranos writer Terence Winter was the season-one showrunner before shifting in season two to a modified, somewhat less powerful head-writer role, reportedly after clashing with Sheridan over the tone of the show. Perhaps not coincidentally, by the time the first season ended, Tulsa King had become less of a lighthearted dramedy — about an old-fashioned New York crime boss way out of his element — and more of a conventional crime drama with betrayals, gunfights, and brooding regrets. In the process, a fun hangout series became more of a chore.
Landman (2024–present)
The latest Sheridan series (only a half-season of which was available to critics at the time of this article) feels like a fusion of Tulsa King, Yellowstone, and Mayor of Kingstown. In the early going, all that really distinguishes it from Sheridan’s other shows is a promising premise and an offbeat lead performance. Billy Bob Thornton stars as Tommy Norris, a fearless Texas oil-company enforcer who handles all the complicated business out in the field — the aging equipment, the exhausted employees, and the often dangerously disgruntled property owners — in order to make life easier for his boss and friend Monty Miller (Jon Hamm). Thornton is wildly entertaining as someone who simply doesn’t get rattled: not by drug cartels, not by environmentalists, and not by his ex-wife (Ali Larter). But although this series is based on a popular nonfiction podcast, Boomtown (hosted by Christian Wallace, who co-created this show), so far, it’s surprisingly weak on storytelling. It mostly coasts on twangy Texas vibes, peppered with shocking incidents.
Yellowstone (2018–present)
It’s no great mystery why Sheridan’s first series has become a global phenomenon. Stunning western landscapes and big personalities make Yellowstone a treat for the eyes and ears, and the piping-hot potboiler plotting offers the kind of sensational conflicts and cliffhangers that keep viewers coming back. Set in a modern Montana where environmentalists, Indigenous tribes, real-estate developers, and ranchers are all fighting over some of the prettiest and most valuable land in America, the show is centered on one bickering family, the Duttons, who have been stewards of a sprawling estate for over 100 years. They’re led by John Dutton III, an ornery character who nevertheless carries the kind of gravitas that only a veteran movie star like Kevin Costner can bring.
It’s also no great mystery why one of the most popular TV dramas of the past decade hasn’t drawn the kind of attention from cultural critics and awards-giving bodies that has gone to similar shows about American politics and money, like Succession, Billions, or Fargo. Though it seems on the surface like a sprawling, ambitious saga about a powerful family fighting to hold onto their property and way of life, the story rarely progresses, returning over and over to the same kinds of standoffs between the Duttons and a rotating cast of rivals, usually after an act of explosive violence that has no long-term repercussions.
Until Costner abruptly left in the middle of the fifth and final season, forcing Sheridan to do something drastic and irreversible with the plot, Yellowstone went through multiple preposterous narrative contortions to keep all of its basic dynamics in place, year after year. The milieu of this show is rich with the kind of fine, knowing detail that makes for great television. But an overall lack of depth and scope has always kept Yellowstone on the “entertaining but inessential” level.
Mayor of Kingstown (2021–present)
Sheridan’s second scripted TV series has never received the level of love from the viewing public that the Yellowstone franchise draws. But across three seasons, Mayor of Kingstown has been one of the most consistently compelling of Sheridan’s shows, with a fresh take on crime and punishment in a dying Rust Belt town. While Yellowstone often features characters making big, sloppy power moves, Mayor of Kingstown is more about small, day-to-day crisis management in a place that may be beyond saving.
Jeremy Renner plays Mike McLusky, whose family has, across multiple generations, served as a go-between for the three powerful factions in their small Michigan city: the police force, the criminal gangs, and the staff and inmates of the big prison that employs (or detains) most of the community. The main goal of the McLuskys has never been to clean up Kingstown, but instead to keep all the cops and crooks just satisfied enough to avoid bloodshed in the streets — a goal rarely achieved. Most of Sheridan’s TV projects have been about people making compromises in no-win situations, but Mayor of Kingstown (co-created with Hugh Dillon, who seems to have taken more of a lead role as a creator in the later seasons) tells stories where failure is far more common than triumph.
Special Ops: Lioness (2023–present)
Perhaps the greatest departure from the Sheridan model, this spy thriller is about a U.S. special-ops team made up mostly of women who go undercover to get close to key military targets. Zoe Saldaña plays Joe, the program’s primary point of contact between Washington (represented largely by Nicole Kidman) and the agents in the field — tearing her away from her children and husband, who himself has a demanding occupation as a pediatric oncologist. As with Mayor of Kingstown and Landman, Lioness sees what Joe and her team do as necessary to preserve the status quo in America, even if it leads to huge compromises in their personal and professional lives, not to mention the many moral and ethical gray areas the show finds itself exploring.
Lioness is operating at a larger scale than the other Sheridan series, with heroes who are trying to (in their view) save the entire world from collapse, not just their dusty hometowns. It’s also the one show in his portfolio where the exciting action sequences rarely feel arbitrary. Episodes often feature logistically complex armed attacks, guided from afar by the top brass, played by the likes of Kidman, Morgan Freeman, Michael Kelly, Jennifer Ehle, and Bruce McGill. The heavyweight cast adds a sense of urgency to every covert invasion and reinforces the idea (shared by Sheridan’s Sicario) that some jobs need armies, not rogues.
1883 (2021–22)
Fans of Sicario and Hell or High Water have been waiting for Sheridan to make something for television as well crafted and potent as those two movies. The Yellowstone prequel miniseries 1883 isn’t quite that, though it does represent Sheridan’s sincere attempt to do something meaningful and artful with the Yellowstone name: using it to make his own Lonesome Dove. Tim McGraw and Faith Hill play the first of the Duttons to settle in Montana, generations before Kevin Costner’s John Dutton III in Yellowstone. 1883 documents the family’s arduous trek across the West as part of a wagon train led by a world-weary old soldier (Sam Elliott).
The show is slow-paced and somber, and Sheridan seems to relish in emphasizing the many ways that pioneers died. But the road-trip structure also imposes some welcome narrative discipline. Sheridan’s passion for this subject is reflected in his thoughtful approach to each stage of the Duttons’ journey. While an overall heaviness weighs 1883 down, there’s a level of personal feeling here that compensates, as Sheridan concocts an American origin story filled with the intentional messiness and ambiguity that has always been his hallmark.
1923 (2022–present)
The second Yellowstone prequel is just as dark and violent as 1883 yet not quite as ponderous — in part because it has more characters and story lines to follow, and in part because its roots are more in pulp fiction than in serious literature. Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren play another pair of Duttons: a childless married couple who have helped nurture and grow the family’s legacy in Montana and are now trying to preserve it before they pass it on to their nephews. Unfortunately, by the 1920s, the age of the pioneer has ended and the age of the banker encroaches.
The western elements of 1923 sit side by side with stories about politicians and robber barons. And while Sheridan’s shows have often tackled racism and the mistreatment of Indigenous people, this series is more upfront about how Montana’s would-be land kings use bigotry to justify their cruelty. Designed to run two seasons — long enough to give the story heft but not long enough that it feels aimless — 1923 is, so far, the best fusion of Sheridan’s sensationalist instincts with his genuine desire to explore how the demands of society can make it hard for well-meaning people to live freely.
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