In his youth Sheriff Parnell McNamara was a big fan of the television series Gunsmoke, about a US marshal trying to bring some law and order to the American frontier.
“The westerns kind of faded out,” says McNamara, 79, the sheriff of McLennan County in central Texas. Then, quite recently, a middling Hollywood actor named Taylor Sheridan started writing films such as Wind River and the TV drama Yellowstone, which revived all the old preoccupations of the western for a new audience: the cowboys, the landowners, the people living beyond the reach of the law.
“All his shows, they are A-plus, they are gritty,” McNamara says. “And very, very realistic.” He is sure that this Sheridan fellow knows his stuff, about horses, about ranching, about the American west. Sheridan is, after all, the sheriff’s nephew. “He was always the little kid running around the house,” McNamara says.
In a little over a decade, by dint of prolific scriptwriting, directing and producing, the little kid has become a Godzilla of American culture — his series Landman is about to begin its second series on Paramount+. There was amazement last month when he was snapped up with a $1 billion contract by NBC Universal, leaving Paramount after seven years of unrivaled success.
Michael Niederman, a professor of film and television at Columbia College, Chicago, compared Sheridan to Dick Wolf, who gave America the Law & Order franchise. “There are often these creators in our culture who have great success but … they aren’t the darlings of the intelligentsia,” he said. “That’s what [Sheridan] is. He is the master of adult melodrama, masquerading as western.”
Sheridan’s shows, which he somehow appears to write almost single-handedly, in a single draft, “have a particularly compelling voice”. They appeal to huge audiences, particularly older, more conservative viewers, Niederman says. The premiere of the last series of Yellowstone was watched by 16 million viewers. “That’s why Comcast wrote him a check for a billion dollars.”
In 2010 Sheridan was a disillusioned Hollywood actor sharing a one-bedroom apartment with no air conditioning with the woman who was to become his wife and a newborn. He is now a landowner in Wyoming and Texas and the proprietor of a famous 266,000-acre horse and cattle ranch.
“The fact that he’s had such cosmic success really tells us something about the kinds of stories that resonate with Americans right now,” says Brian DeLay, a history professor at UC Berkeley.
Sheridan was born Sheridan Taylor Gibler Jr and grew up in Fort Worth. His father, Sheridan Taylor Gibler, a cardiologist, “raised his [three] children on Monty Python, John Waters and Clint Eastwood films”, according to an obituary. Dr Gibler and his wife, Susan, bought a weekend ranch in a little place called Cranfills Gap, near Waco, when Sheridan was eight and as a teenager he worked on a neighboring ranch.
There was also a spell with pneumonia, when he was 13, when he was confined indoors watching westerns. “You see the same one nine times and you start kind of studying it,” he told Andrea Fappani, an Italian equestrian who sold Sheridan several horses, and who hosts a podcast called Along for the Ride.
Sheridan acted in high school, after he was injured playing for the school’s football team. In Austin, where he found work as a landscaper after dropping out of college, he was approached by a model scout, who sent him to audition in Chicago. This led to spots in advertisements and parts in a few soap operas in New York. He moved to Los Angeles, where he was able to make a living as an actor, keep his hand in as a horseman, and begin dating a model from Wyoming named Nicole Muirbrook.
It was only when Muirbrook was expecting their first child that he began to fret about his prospects, and the thought of his son growing up in Los Angeles, without a yard, or “the freedom I had as a kid … to go out and get bucked off a horse and break your arm”, he told Fappani.
He was appearing in a crime drama called Sons of Anarchy where his salary lagged behind the other actors. The producers made clear to him, in a fraught conversation, that they could not imagine him commanding a higher one.
He quit, sold his horses and moved with Muirbrook into a smaller flat, storing much of their stuff in his horse trailer that he parked at a friend’s house. Then he began to write scripts. The first of these to get made was the 2015 film Sicario, a thriller about the drug war starring Emily Blunt, but he also wrote a series about a family in a small town in Michigan who run a private prison that got some attention (a decade later it became the series Mayor of Kingstown), and the script for a film called Hell or High Water, set in Texas during the great recession, about two brothers robbing banks in an effort to save their ranch.
Sheriff McNamara, Sheridan’s uncle, was able to offer Jeff Bridges, who plays a Texas Ranger in the film, some guidance on how he would handle a confrontation with one of the brothers. “Jeff and I became good friends,” McNamara says.
Sheridan makes a cameo in the film as a cowboy attempting to save his cattle from a fire. “It’d be easier if I just stood here and let it turn me to ashes. Put me out of my misery,” he tells Bridges’s character, when the Ranger happens by in his car. “It’s the 21st century and I’m racing a fire to the river with 300 cattle. No wonder my kids don’t wanna do this nonsense for a living.”
As they drive away, the Ranger observes to his partner that it is no good calling for help. “No one to call around here anyway,” he replies. “These boys is on their own.”
It is a regular theme in Sheridan’s productions. He felt well placed to tell these stories, he told Fappani. “Most writers and most directors are … from New York, they’re from LA or some big city, and people tell stories that they know,” he said. “There’s nobody that’s telling the stories about people that grew up in the rural Midwest or Texas or Wyoming … which is odd because, you know, that’s half the population.”
It seemed to him that urban America had a limited understanding of rural America, and vice versa. Yellowstone brought rural Montana to audiences of tens of millions. Starring Kevin Costner as John Dutton, the patriarch of a ranch the size of Rhode Island, it established Sheridan as the new king of the western, the Shakespeare of the rope opera. He told Fappani that it allowed him to explore “the way that the west is being gentrified, the way money from these big urban centers is coming in, changing the dynamic, changing the politics”.
But not everyone saw the appeal. HBO rejected the show because, as one executive told Sheridan, “it feels so Middle America” and “it feels like a step backwards. And frankly … I don’t think anyone should be living out there [in rural Montana]. It should be a park or something.”
Yellowstone has been dubbed “the Republican show”. The historian DeLay believes his writing tends to focus on individuals far more than the social dynamics shaping them. Sheridan regularly talks about how little rural Americans feel they get from the government, besides regulations, taxes and military service.
But he has also pointed out the way Yellowstone highlights “the displacement of Native Americans and the way Native American women were treated and about corporate greed and the gentrification of the west, and land-grabbing. That’s a red state show?”
More recent Sheridan creations include Tulsa King, featuring Sylvester Stallone as a New York mobster transplanted to Oklahoma, and Landman, based on a podcast about the Texas oil boom, starring Billy Bob Thornton as a negotiator for the oil giants, securing land leases and managing the police, the press and the occasional Mexican drug lord.
They are in the same business, he assures the drug lord, from under a hood, his hands tied behind his back. “You sell a product your customer is dependent on,” he says. “It’s the same. Ours is just bigger.”
Somehow, amid all this writing, he found time to become obsessed with “reining”, a sort of cowboy dressage, investing his considerable focus and resources into building up a stable of horses and competing in events, and eventually launching a reality TV series that follows the sport.
Sheridan himself, by this time, was becoming a power in the land. In 2022, with the aid of investors, he bought the 266,000-acre Four Sixes Ranch in northern Texas, for a reported $350 million. In 2023 The Wall Street Journal reported that the epic costs for Yellowstone and its spin-offs (said to have reached $22 million an episode on the prequel series 1923, starring Harrison Ford) included money Sheridan charged the studio to rent his horses. He was also renting out his own land, as locations for his shows, according to the paper. He was starting to look like one of his characters.
DeLay thinks Sheridan offers a flattering view of rural America, if you do not look too carefully at the body count. What does a cowboy make of Yellowstone? “I will be honest,” says Gail Steiger, who manages a 50,000-acre ranch in Arizona. He and his wife had a go at the first season of Yellowstone, he said, and “it was just too far away from anything I knew. It is not real typical of ranching, to murder our partners and neighbors and to brand the people who are working for us.”
But he is very impressed with Sheridan’s record as a cowboy. Steiger’s wife, Amy, hails from the tiny town of Guthrie, where the Four Sixes Ranch has its headquarters. “As far as cowboy culture goes, he is right in the middle of it with that,” Steiger says. “And he rents all his horses out to the production companies that are making his shows. It’s a pretty smart move.”
McNamara appears astounded by his nephew’s success. “He’s certainly made a name for himself and he is a genius at writing these screenplays. Everything he touches seems to turn to gold,” he says. “People are buying cowboy hats right and left. He’s made it really cool again.”
Will Pavia is the New York correspondent for The Times of London
