Football aside, the biggest TV event of each of the past two Sundays has arguably been the finale of a Taylor Sheridan show. Two Sundays ago, Season 2 of Lioness concluded with a raid across the Iranian border that quickly became a massive firefight—the latest sudden, dramatic escalation in the show’s geopolitical pissing match involving global superpowers (not to mention Mexican cartels). And this past Sunday, Yellowstone’s series finale resolved the fate (for now) of the late John Dutton’s unreasonably large ranch, as well as the blood feud between two of his kids. Many millions of viewers watched the action-packed episodes, both of which were written by the two hit series’ creator.
It’s SOP for Sheridan to pump out his series’ scripts: He’s written or cowritten every episode of Lioness and Yellowstone. And it’s hardly unheard of for him to hop behind the camera, as he did in directing Yellowstone’s supersized last act. It’s more unusual for him to write and be on both sides of the camera, but Sheridan penned prominent parts for himself in both Lioness Season 2 and Yellowstone Season 5, which called for significant screen time during the denouements. Maybe the multi-hyphenate’s decision to center himself shouldn’t surprise us, though. Lately, Taylor Sheridan shows have turned into the Taylor Sheridan show.
Sheridan didn’t appear on-screen in the first season of Lioness, but he inserted himself into three of eight episodes in the recently wrapped second season, as a special-forces force of nature with the porn-ready moniker Cody Spears. On Yellowstone, his horse-trainer character Travis Wheatley guested infrequently on the first four-plus seasons, in most cases making quick cameos, and didn’t show up at all in the eight episodes that aired before an extended midseason break for the fifth and final season. Yet after the break (and the departure of Yellowstone star Kevin Costner from the cast), Taylor/Travis—America’s second-most prominent Tayvis—crashed the screen in four of six installments and played an important part in bailing the Duttons out of a potentially ruinous tax situation. In each of these shows, Sheridan’s character came to the rescue of a female protagonist who’s the furthest thing from a damsel in distress.
Viewers have seen much more of him than we’re used to, and I mean that in more than one way. Sheridan made his Lioness acting debut in the Season 2 premiere, as his character accompanied protagonist Joe (Zoe Saldaña) and her quick-response force on a dangerous mission into Mexico. When we meet Mr. Spears, the vascular, striated Sheridan is stripping down and gearing up alongside Saldaña, an activity that gives him the chance to show off his guns and his guns. It’s a scene that seems calculated to highlight how big a beefcake he is, via half-frontal shots of him flexing from the waist up.
The shirtless Sheridan revue continued on the penultimate episode of Yellowstone, in which Beth Dutton pays a visit to Travis’s Texas haunt and endures the indignity of a pool party and a strip-poker game—ideal settings in which to display Sheridan’s mounds of upper-body man meat.
Whatever his workout and supplement regimen may be, the 54-year-old looks like a walking advertisement for TRT. Sheridan has always been built—peep his physique on Veronica Mars almost 20 years ago—but he’s clearly been hitting the weights in whatever free time he has when he’s not creating, writing, or directing. And he’s unabashed about showing some skin.
The stripteases aren’t the most preposterous aspects of Sheridan’s roles. On Lioness, Cody is a one-man army. “Getting a little long in the tooth for this, aren’t you?” Joe asks him in the premiere. With a chuckle, Spears responds, “Well, you know what they say, Joe. Beware the old soldier. He’s old for a reason.” We soon see the reason: Even when he’s cornered, Cody is unkillable. In the finale, Spears saves the day by mowing down dozens of enemies without suffering a scratch, thereby bolstering the good guys’ infinite kill-to-death ratio. Have I mentioned that he takes out a tank almost single-handedly?
I’m not sure whether Travis from Yellowstone could do that, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Travis is a gifted trainer and seller who gets such good prices for the ranch’s horses that the Duttons are able to buy themselves time to think of a long-term solution for preserving their land. Until Season 5, we hadn’t heard much about the character’s personal life, but in the second-to-last episode, we learn more than anyone wanted to know. When he’s off the clock, Travis evidently lives like Dan Bilzerian, surrounded by a bevy of beauties at a perpetual party. Oh, and he’s dating Bella Hadid—or, to be more precise, Sadie, a character played by Hadid. (Granted, Sheridan is married to a real-life former model and avid horse girl, albeit one with half the age gap of the one between him and Hadid.)
In one scene, Beth questions Sadie about what she sees in Travis. “I have to ask, ’cause I am fսcking fascinated,” she says. “He is probably the most arrogant man that I have ever met in my entire life. Condescending, misogynistic, 25 years older than you. Can you please explain the appeal?”
Sadie, stars in her eyes, answers, “You ever seen him ride before?”
Yellowstone’s audience has seen him ride before, a bunch of times, but Sheridan immediately makes sure we remember the majesty: Travis, a human stud mounted on an equine stud who’s about to be sold for $3 million, puts the purebred through its paces, demonstrating some expert horse-spinning, horse hockey stops, and cow-confusing. (I’m not sure my watching of Sheridan shows has taught me the technical terms for fancy horse tricks.)
“OK, yeah, I get it,” concedes Beth, the ultimate maneater—a woman who normally makes a sport of destroying arrogant men’s self-esteem. Beth is loath to ask a man for anything—in the finale, she neglects to ask her husband, Rip, for help in her duel to the death with adoptive brother Jamie, trusting that Rip will come to her rescue without being asked—but she pleads for assistance from Travis, after once again acknowledging his animal magnetism. “You are such a fucking asshole, it is almost attractive,” she tells him.
The trainer’s alpha appeal and sales sense are just two of his many enviable qualities: On top of everything else, he’s also a fantastic poker player, a hilarious storyteller, a fearless fighter, and a true friend. “I thought it was a pretty bold move on his part, but I think it served the story,” Yellowstone executive producer Christina Alexandra Voros told Variety about Sheridan’s decision to elevate himself to costar in the last set of episodes. I’d definitely agree with the first part of that statement.
In basketball parlance, a “heat check” is what happens when a player who hasn’t missed in some time chucks up an ill-advised shot just to test how hot they are. If that shot falls for a bucket, then they must be in the zone. Sheridan’s decision to seize the spotlight and make his characters’ badassery and sex appeal canonical qualifies as a scalding, off-the-charts heat check. Not since Stephen King wrote himself into the last two books of The Dark Tower has a creator seemed quite so high on his own supply. (Figuratively speaking; King has been sober since the ’80s.)
Sheridan would be justified in feeling himself. Last month, a total of five new episodes of four different Sheridan shows aired on the same day, a feat I dubbed the “Taylor Sheridan equinox.” Landman, in the midst of its 10-episode first season, will run through mid-January. And although the other three shows are all on break (or, in Yellowstone’s case, concluded), we won’t have to wait long for the next Sheridan show: Yellowstone spinoff 1923 will return for a second season on February 23. In addition to more Mayor of Kingstown and presumably more Tulsa King and Lioness, at least three more new Yellowstone properties seem to be in the works: The Madison, starring Michelle Pfeiffer; a newly confirmed follow-up to Yellowstone featuring Beth and Rip; and presumably, at some point, the previously announced 6666. (Personally, I’d like to see a spinoff featuring Jamie’s tight-lipped, long-suffering assistant, who heard and saw so much from her desk outside the attorney general’s office. Whatever she was earning, it wasn’t enough.)
Speaking of 6666, the Yellowstone finale also functions as the latest in a series of backdoor pilots for the spinoff set on that sprawling King County, Texas ranch—the one that a buyer group represented by Sheridan agreed to purchase in 2021. Sheridan has long insisted on using his own land, livestock, and horses in his shows—which some sources have claimed leads to higher costs—and in the last season of Yellowstone, he seemed to double down on self-promotion with what may have been the most egregious example of product placement I’ve ever seen.
In Season 5, Episode 10, Beth drives down to Texas to visit Rip, who’s taking care of the Yellowstone’s horses at the Four Sixes. She’s pulled over for speeding, but the trooper’s tone changes when Beth tells her that she’s visiting her husband at the Four Sixes—which Beth is surprised to discover that the trooper has heard of. “This is Texas,” the trooper tells her. “Kids study it in school.” Beth gets off with a warning and a request to “Tell your husband thank you for what he does.”
Later, she gets off with Rip at a hotel room, after which the couple pays a visit to a downstairs speakeasy for a post-coital cocktail. Beth orders a martini with a double shot of Tito’s. “Uh, we don’t have Tito’s. This is all we carry,” says the bartender, before brandishing a bottle of Four Sixes spirits. “They have their own vodka?” Beth asks. The bartender answers, “They have their own everything, ma’am,” before mixing her a “Sixes and soda.” All that’s missing is a QR code to access the shop at the Four Sixes site.
Increasingly, it also seems as if Sheridan slips transparent polemics into his scripts, using characters as mouthpieces for anti-woke commentary. That viral, misleading Landman monologue about renewable energy. The Yellowstone scene in Season 5, Episode 10, where the cowboys discuss which words it’s no longer acceptable to say. A Lioness non sequitur in Season 2, Episode 3, in which a pediatric oncologist “disagrees” with people who identify as trans. The speech in Episode 5 when Pablo Carrillo—granted, not a good guy—laments the state of the military and the border and forecasts the fall of the American empire. Or the scene in Episode 7 when Secretary of State Mullins (Morgan Freeman) takes the media to task for “telling us what they think the news is” instead of “reporting the news,” and then blames COVID-era disunity on the lack of leaders like George W. Bush. (“Say what you want about what he did after, but … you can't say anything about a man who stood before Congress and emboldened the nation to come together.”)
Add all of the above to the usual Yellowstone indulgences: protracted, admittedly mesmerizing scenes of riding and roping; cameos by real-life cowboys who can’t act; bands playing country songs in their entirety. (To be clear, I have an unlimited appetite for pedal steel.) It seems quite clear that Sheridan never gets a network note—or that if he does, he’s free to toss it. He has Paramount eating out of his hand like one of Travis’s well-trained horses. As Voros said to Variety, “Show me someone 20 years ago who could be living in Texas and running half a dozen TV series from the place that he wants to be living in because he hates L.A.”
And, well, why would anyone expect the normal network-creator rules to apply? It’s not the normal network-creator relationship, because Sheridan isn’t bound by the normal rules of TV productivity. He has the magic touch, and he’s too big to quail. As long as he’s supplying a streaming service’s worth of content, and as long as most of it remains popular, he’ll get to do what he wants, even if it’s sometimes to the content’s detriment. Maybe he once took Costner’s opinions into account, but Taylor is unquestionably the captain now—as illustrated in Season 5, Episode 12, when Sheridan’s Travis tells Yellowstone-turned–Four Sixes hand Jimmy that Jimmy’s mentor, John Dutton, is dead. “I don’t know,” Travis says when Jimmy asks how it happened. “Does it matter? It don’t make a difference now.”
I wouldn’t say Sheridan sank his shots, though I don’t think Travis ruined Yellowstone Season 5. (Even if it was way worse than the earlier ones.) Sheridan is, at least, an experienced actor, so his screen presence isn’t distracting until he takes off his clothes. So please don’t put in the newspaper that I got mad; mostly, I’m marveling at what the creator-showrunner-writer-director-actor-rancher–vodka merchant gets away with. The Lioness and Yellowstone finales were largely entertaining and at least somewhat satisfying, however abrupt and implausible.
Some aspects of Yellowstone and Lioness may hew uncomfortably close to reality—not including Nicole Kidman’s and Kelly Reilly’s American accents—but I don’t expect airtight plotting or subtle character work from what have always been pretty pulpy, soapy series. (See Dawn Olivieri getting gunned down on Yellowstone’s November 24 episode, then appearing as a different character on the very next week’s Lioness.) This newly over-the-top Taylor could get tiresome in time, but thus far, he hasn’t exceeded my tolerance for his habitual heightened ridiculousness. At the tail end of Yellowstone, comic relief was in fairly short supply.
All of that said: I get it if you don’t get it. I imagine myself standing next to someone who hasn’t seen any Sheridan shows, and reenacting that Beth-Sadie scene.
“Can you please explain the appeal?” they’d ask about my fondness for his work.
I’d pull up his IMDb page and, with quiet wonder, say, “You ever seen him write before?”
Then they’d watch a few minutes of Yellowstone or Lioness … which would turn into a few episodes, and soon, several seasons. And then, like a spellbound Beth staring at Travis, they might be forced to say, “Yeah, I get it.”
