In a scene from the series premiere of the new Taylor Sheridan show Landman, which will air this Sunday on Paramount+, three oil men squabble in the kitchen of the rental house they share. One of them, reprimanded for messily microwaving a can of beans, exclaims, “Well, shit, I guess cowboy culture’s out the fucking window with you two, huh?” Protagonist Tommy Norris, played laconically—how else?—by Billy Bob Thornton, retorts, “You see a cowboy in this room, you point him out.”
There are countless cowboy hats on Landman, but in the two episodes that will, well, land on Paramount+ this Sunday, no actual cowboys. If you want a Taylor Sheridan show about cowboys, though, you won’t have to wait long after Landman drops at 3 a.m. ET: Just put on Paramount Network on Sunday evening, when a new episode of Yellowstone—another show that easily could’ve been called Landman—will air. Maybe you’re more in the mood for a mob show? Good news: The Season 2 finale of Taylor Sheridan’s Tulsa King will pop up on Paramount+ at the same time as Landman. Or perhaps you prefer spy thrillers? Consider trying the Taylor Sheridan show Lioness, which also appears on Paramount+. There’s about to be a new episode—yes, you guessed it, this Sunday.
To recap, or precap: That’s four distinct Taylor Sheridan shows, each releasing a new episode—two episodes, in Landman’s case—on the same damn day. We’re past peak TV, and the industry is downsizing, but Sheridan must have missed the memo: The public face of the ownership group that purchased the Four Sixes Ranch has turned this weekend’s small-screen landscape into his Four Series Ranch. On the seventh day, God rested. Taylor Sheridan showed up for four different jobs.
Three Sheridan shows have aired on the same day during a couple of previous periods: Yellowstone, 1883, and Mayor of Kingstown in December 2021 into January 2022, and Yellowstone, 1923, and Tulsa King in December 2022 into January 2023. But until now, I don’t think he’d ever run his tally to four—his niftiest feat of writing since the man born Sheridan Taylor Gibler Jr. rearranged his name. We need a new name for this phenomenon, and I believe I’ve got a good one.
The Ringer’s Streaming Guide
There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.
October 28 marked the most recent instance of a sporadically occurring cultural phenomenon: a sports equinox, when MLB, the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL are all in action on the same day. The chance to watch World Series Game 3, Monday Night Football, and your pick of the NBA and NHL slates simultaneously was special and all, but it wasn’t that rare: Sports equinoxes have happened 31 times. Nor can all of those disparate sports be traced back to the mind of one man. Which is why the pop-culture counterpart to the sports equinox deserves its own title: the Taylor Sheridan equinox.
Sheridan, 54, was a late-blooming screenwriter—he didn’t transition from acting to writing until after he turned 40—but he’s more than made up for lost time. Starting with Sicario in 2015, Sheridan has written six films (two of which he directed) and produced a seventh. He’s also produced nine TV series—eight of which he created, seven of which he helped write or wrote by himself, four of which he helped direct, and three of which he appeared in as an actor with a recurring role. All but two of those nine series are still running, but Sheridan’s project portfolio is still expanding: At least two more—maybe three more—Yellowstone spinoffs are in the works, as well as an adaptation of the book Empire of the Summer Moon. My man also announced a new reality show—a singing competition cocreated with Blake Shelton—while I was working on this article. What Strega Nona’s magic pot is to pasta, Taylor Sheridan is to TV.
It’s hard enough to find time to watch all of Sheridan’s shows, let alone make them. How he does all that while maintaining a family, a 260,000 acre ranch, and a physique buff enough for him to play a special forces soldier on Lioness—a role that required him to get shirtless opposite Zoe Saldaña, in both a literal and figurative flex—is one of the entertainment wonders of the world. Sheridan’s output is legend, but the Taylor Sheridan equinox may be the most magnificent monument yet to his powers as a TV content creator. No wonder Sheridan was unavailable for an interview for this story; he’ll probably pump out a script or two in the time it would have taken to talk to me. (He wrote the Tulsa King pilot—including the brainstorming stage—in less than a day, and claims to have written “many episodes” in eight to 10 hours while ensconced in a one-room “cabinet” that The Hollywood Reporter described as a “script-generating isolation bunker.” He works 14 to 16 hours a day—potentially long enough for two scripts.)
It’s tough to say for certain whether or how often other TV creator equinoxes have occurred; there’s no Elias Sports Bureau to keep track of such stats for TV, and plumbing IMDb’s depths for such data would be a big lift. Plenty of equinox candidates come to mind, from former luminaries like Norman Lear and Steven Bochco to current TV mavens such as Tyler Perry, Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes, Greg Berlanti, David E. Kelley, Chuck Lorre, and Bill Lawrence. It’s hardly unheard of to have four or more shows running concurrently, but the “same day” condition should winnow the contenders down. Murphy’s case is instructive: At times this year, he’s had more shows than Sheridan on the air, but their releases were staggered: 9-1-1: Lone Star on Mondays, American Horror Stories and American Sports Story on Tuesdays, Grotesquerie on Wednesday, Doctor Odyssey and 9-1-1 on Thursdays. The sun rarely set on Ryan Murphy’s TV empire, but most of that empire’s outposts had whole days to themselves.
This Sunday’s equinox probably isn’t all Sheridan’s doing; he may make the TV, but he doesn’t decide when it airs. And from afar, stacking four series on Sunday—three of which will become available on the same streaming service at precisely the same time—does seem suboptimal, synergistic marketing opportunities notwithstanding. Attempts to speak to an executive at MTV Entertainment Studios, which produces Sheridan’s shows, also proved futile by press time—which is too bad, because I have a lot of questions.
Such as: How far in advance are release dates determined, and at what point did it become clear that these four series would briefly overlap? Was there any reluctance to air new episodes of so many series at the same time, what with the risk of cannibalizing each other’s audiences? (Yellowstone alone is still massive, as evidenced by the estimated 16.4 million spectators who watched last week’s Season 5B premiere—roughly double the same-night viewing totals for the finales of The Last of Us Season 1 and House of the Dragon Season 2.) Do viewers of series set in the Yellowstone universe—Yellowstone, 1883, 1923, and the upcoming 6666, The Madison, and potentially 1944—exist in a separate silo from viewers of Sheridan shows outside the Dutton-verse, or is the Sheridan audience more insatiable than that? Is the goal to have a Sheridan show (or shows) on the air year-round? With so many Sheridan shows in the Paramount pipeline, how hard is it to keep the writing/shooting/post-production workflow functioning?
Even if there’s precedent for this weekend’s Connect Four, some aspects of Sheridan’s oeuvre might still set this impressive show-ing apart. For one, the multi-hyphenate is hands-on: Sheridan has received a writing credit on every episode of Yellowstone, and since Season 3, he’s written every episode singlehandedly, just as he has for every episode of 1883 and 1923, and all but one episode of Lioness. (Only on Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, and Lawmen: Bass Reeves—perhaps not coincidentally, three of his less acclaimed small-screen creations—has he handed off the writing regularly or fully.) For another, he makes huge hits. And his projects’ degree of difficulty is considerable: We’re not talking sitcoms filmed on studio sets or cookie-cutter procedurals that follow the same formula from week to week. Sheridan deals in lengthy dramas, many of them shot on location and featuring fancy effects or ensemble, star-studded casts. And he isn’t serving up slop: His work is Oscar-nominated at best, watchable at worst. (Based on what I’ve seen so far, Landman is more the latter.)
Could he benefit from writers rooms, which he’s generally resisted? Sure; I think almost any showrunner could. Has his workload taken a toll on the quality of his writing? Maybe; Yellowstone’s decline has coincided with a rapid ramp-up in his other obligations. I can’t prove this, but it seems to me that over time, an increasing percentage of Yellowstone screen time has been devoted to actual cowboying—riding, roping, reining, and so on—at the expense of story and dialogue, as if a pressed-for-time Sheridan has taken to penciling “TK horse stuff” into his scripts.
Other hallmarks of Sheridan shows may help him speed up production. His stable of horses is huge; his collection of actors, prone to repeats that Sheridan completists can quickly recall. Landman’s cast, for instance, features Thornton and Michelle Randolph, who previously appeared in 1883 and 1923, respectively. Even more unmissable is one of Sheridan’s biggest beneficiaries, James Jordan, who’s had six roles in a row come in Sheridan projects—Those Who Wish Me Dead, Mayor of Kingstown, Yellowstone, 1883, Lioness, Landman—plus a seventh, Wind River, that preceded that streak. Other prominent multi-time Sheridan cast members include Jeremy Renner, Jon Bernthal, Ian Bohen, Aidan Gillen, Gil Birmingham, and Dave Annable. There’s nothing wrong with recycling actors—some directors do it all the time—but if you thought British TV was full of familiar faces, get a load of Sheridan’s shows. He’s created a TV island unto himself.
Some of the shows on Sheridan Island share certain touchstones. A-list, aged stars, many of them more famous from film work and some of them making their streaming TV debuts. Plenty of young, pretty people to provide titillation, and generous helpings of violence and sex. A blend of prestige-style storytelling and soapy, implausible melodrama. Proximity to hot-button topics like incarceration and climate change, without overt political points of view. Lots of sweeping, heartland vistas and montages of men and women at work. A general distrust of modernity, and an affection for dying breeds.
Then again, it’s not as if Sheridan hasn’t branched out, geographically and conceptually. He’s spun yarns that range from ranches to oil rigs; from the FBI to the CIA; from the U.S. Marshals to the mob; from the cartel to terrorists; from white settlers to the people they oppressed; from Montana to Michigan, and Texas to Tulsa. In Lioness, he even turns his attention to the East Coast, to the other side of the Atlantic, and to the true final frontier: female main characters.
Thus, “There’s a Taylor Sheridan show for that” is the new “There’s an app for that”—which is crucial to Paramount’s plans, as the company straps its app to the back of its golden goose. Sheridan doesn’t work cheap, but his brain has been a gushing geyser of the kind that the roughnecks of Landman—which is based on the Boomtown podcast—are trying to tap. As a result, the Taylor Sheridan equinox is upon us, and any hours on Sunday that football doesn’t dominate can comfortably be filled by Sheridan shows. It’s a solo HBO lineup, a one-man Must See TV.
I thought about projecting Taylor Sheridan’s long-term annual output of TV by irresponsibly extrapolating from his past performance (which, as the financial fine print always warns us, is no guarantee of future results). But his march toward a double-digit total of discrete TV shows actually suffered a serious setback this year, which marked the first time since 2020 that his count didn’t climb. It seems as if the Fed has succeeded in slowing inflation in Taylor Sheridan shows, in addition to the dollar.
Look, maybe the man maxed out at seven series in one year, and maybe he’ll never surpass four series on the same day. But I wouldn’t put it past Sheridan, or past Paramount, to pull a Gillette and declare, Fuck everything, we’re doing five Sheridan shows. TV is the trailer park. Taylor’s the tornado.
