Taylor Sheridan has built one of the most-watched television empires on the planet, and he wants everyone to know he did it without chasing trophies or taking notes from the people who sign his paychecks.
The “Yellowstone” creator unloaded on studio and network brass during an appearance on “The Bill Simmons Podcast,” where he turned up to promote his new book “How Not to Die in Prison,” co-written with Tom Nelson. Sheridan, who has two series on the Emmy ballot this year, the freshman drama “The Madison” and the sophomore season of “Landman,” spoke with the sports podcaster about doing the opposite of what the industry had told him to.
“I knew when I started writing [I wanted] to simply not do what everyone else was doing,” he said on the episode. “What everyone else was doing was taking shortcuts, essentially breaking all the very basic fundamental rules of storytelling, because they couldn’t figure out their story. With a movie, you’re supposed to show me what’s happening. The camera is supposed to move the story. The dialogue is supposed to tell me how the people in this world feel about what’s happening or what they hope to do or what they wish they hadn’t done or had done.”
Sheridan got specific about some of the criticism he anticipated for “Landman,” the Paramount+ drama in which Demi Moore spent most of the first season near a swimming pool. Sheridan admitted that she was told up front that she would essentially be an extra in Season 1 before moving into a central role in Season 2, and he knew exactly how that would play out. “The critics are going to come after me. I’m underutilizing [Moore], can’t write for women, all this nonsense. Then I’m going to kill your husband and you’re going to have to run the oil company. The critics and me — I don’t care what they think, and it annoys the shit out of them that I don’t care. I’ll be the first to tell you that there are things that I do that rage-bait them a bit, and this is one of them. Fuck ’em, honestly.”
The multihyphenate also took shots at Marvel as an example of the problem in Hollywood, saying its films lean on characters delivering “information dumps that you have to follow to get to the action rather than actually moving plot with action.”
Sheridan, who lives outside Fort Worth, Texas, and keeps a place in Wyoming, saved his harshest words for the executives overseeing that work, saying they know “nothing” about story.
“It didn’t used to be this way when Steve McQueen was a movie star at Paramount and Bobby Evans ran the studio because writers were turned loose. Directors were turned completely loose. There weren’t endless rewrites. There weren’t meetings with executives about tone and mood and all this nonsense.”
He continued: “By the way, the studio executives and the network executives — these are marketing executives, for the most part. Or maybe they studied law or whatever. Then they came, got a job in the mailroom at CAA or WME, and hated that shit. So then they ended up as an intern at some network. Then, through attrition, they find themselves the head of development. Well, what do you know about developing story? You know nothing. So they get terrified, panicked that the audience won’t get it because they actually have no storytellers.”
Those executives, he said, now want character synopses “before we meet the character.”
He added, “Our business, at this point, is truly governed by these executives because they’re the ones that are going to determine whether or not your script is going to go into production. They’re going to try and control every element of that.”
It’s a dynamic Sheridan said he refused when he signed his deal with Paramount. “This is not a democracy. There’s no committee. You’re going to pay me and you’re going to give me a bunch of money and I’m going to deliver you these shows. I’m pretty common and I’m going to tell stories that common people are going to understand. That’s most of America,” he said. “You’re not going to win no Emmys with me, but I’m not trying to win Emmys. That’s not my goal. My goal is to sit somebody on their couch and move them, make them think, make them laugh, scare the shit out of them, excite them. That’s what I want to do, because that’s what I want from a show.”
In a time when productions in Los Angeles continue to struggle, Sheridan also said he has no interest in ever returning to the City of Angels.
“The only way you’re getting me back to Los Angeles is if it secedes from the union and I’m drafted into the Army to take it back. It’s the only way,” he expressed. “I love New York. That city’s way, way stronger than whatever political wind is blowing it in any direction, right? Whereas L.A. is built on sand.”
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