Taylor Sheridan has built one of the most-watched television empires on the planet. He wants everyone to know he accomplished it without chasing trophies or taking notes on people signing paychecks.
The “Yellowstone” creator appeared on the “Bill Simmons Podcast” to promote his new book, “How Not to Die in Jail,” co-written with Tom Nelson, and took down studio and network executives. Sheridan, who has two series on this year’s Emmy ballot, the freshman drama “The Madison” and the sophomore season “Landman,” spoke to the sports podcaster about doing the opposite of what the industry dictates.
“From the moment I started writing, I knew I didn’t want to do the same thing that everyone else was doing,” he said in the episode. “What everyone else was doing was taking shortcuts and not being able to understand the story, so they were essentially breaking all the very basic rules of storytelling. In a movie, you’re supposed to show what’s going on. The camera is supposed to move the story. The dialogue is supposed to tell me how people in this world feel about what’s going on, what they want to do, what they should have done, what they should have done.”
Sheridan specifically addressed some of the criticism he expected for the Paramount+ drama “Landman,” in which Demi Moore spent most of its first season near a pool. Sheridan admitted that he was told in advance that he would essentially be an extra in season 1 before moving into a central role in season 2, and said he knew exactly how it would play out. “The critics are going to come after me, saying I’m not using[Moore]enough, I can’t write for women, all this crap. And I’m going to kill your husband and you have to run an oil company.” I don’t care what they think. I’ll be the first to say that there are things I do that piss them off.”
The multihyphenate also criticized Marvel as an example of Hollywood’s problems, saying its films rely on providing “information dumps that characters have to follow leading up to the action” rather than actually driving the plot with action.
Mr. Sheridan, who lives outside Fort Worth, Texas, but maintains a home in Wyoming, had the harshest words for the executives overseeing the film: He knew “nothing” about the story.
“It wasn’t like this when Steve McQueen was the movie star at Paramount and Bobby Evans ran the studio, because the writers were left alone. The directors were also completely left alone. There were no endless rewrites. There were no meetings with executives about tone and atmosphere and all that nonsense.”
“By the way, studio executives and network executives are mostly marketing executives. Or maybe they studied law or something. Then they come and get a job in the mailroom at CAA or WME and hate that shit. And then they end up interning at some network or another. And then they went through attrition and found themselves in charge of the development. Well, what do you know about developing the story? So they’re scared and they panic and they don’t understand because they don’t really have a storyteller. ”
Those executives now want to know the plot of a character “before they meet the character,” he said.
He added: “Right now, our business is completely controlled by these executives because they are the ones who decide whether a script goes into production or not. They want to control every element of it.”
That’s the dynamic Sheridan said he rejected when he signed the contract with Paramount. “This is not a democracy. There are no committees. You guys are going to pay me, give me a lot of money, and I’m going to bring you these shows. I’m going to tell stories that are pretty mundane and that the average person can understand. That’s what most of America is,” he said. “It’s not like you can’t win an Emmy with me, but I’m not trying to win an Emmy. That’s not my goal. My goal is to put someone on their couch and move them, make them think, make them laugh, scare them, get them excited. That’s what I want to do, because that’s what I want the show to be.”
Sheridan also said he has no intention of returning to the City of Angels as the Los Angeles production continues to struggle.
“The only way to get me back to Los Angeles is for the union to secede from the union and for me to be drafted into the military and get it back. That’s the only way,” he expressed. “I love New York. The way that city works is much stronger than any political wind blowing in any direction, right? Los Angeles, on the other hand, is built on sand.”
