"For both Taylor Sheridan and the Yellowstone universe, 1883 is just the beginning," Alison Herman says of Sheridan. " A second spinoff, 6666, will center on a real-life ranch in Texas, while Mayor of Kingstown, another Sheridan cocreation, debuted earlier this fall on Paramount+. (An ensemble show about a Michigan town bound up in mass incarceration, Kingstown has no narrative overlap with Yellowstone.) Sheridan has also teamed with Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter for Kansas City, a starring vehicle for Sylvester Stallone, and is producing Land Man, an adaptation of a narrative podcast about the West Texas oil industry. Like Kingstown and 1883, both series will air on Paramount+, part of Sheridan’s lucrative overall deal with ViacomCBS. He’s even dipped his toe into unscripted programming, producing a docuseries called The Last Cowboy that’s set to move from the depleted Paramount Network to CMT. It’s an impressive portfolio for any showrunner, let alone someone who didn’t start writing screenplays until they were 40 years old. Sheridan is one of those Hollywood types whose life story feels like movie material in its own right. After growing up on a ranch and flunking out of Texas State University, a Hollywood talent scout spotted Sheridan in Austin, leading to two decades of work as a journeyman actor in LA. (His Fairfax-area fourplex was once also home to Michael Mann.) While renegotiating his contract for Sons of Anarchy, Sheridan had an epiphany: He didn’t want to raise his newborn son in a cramped apartment on an unsteady income. So he quit acting, maxed out his wife’s credit card on a copy of Final Draft, and got to work on Sicario, his first-ever script. For a while, features were Sheridan’s bread and butter. His sophomore effort, Hell or High Water—the story of two brothers who rob banks in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, written in just three weeks—earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Sicario became the rare original concept successful enough to earn a sequel, which Sheridan also wrote. In 2017, he broke into Hollywood directing with Wind River, starring Jeremy Renner as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent who gets caught up in the search for a missing Native woman against the backdrop of a brutal Wyoming winter. But like for many auteurs before him, the siren song of TV proved too compelling to resist. The blockbuster success of Yellowstone would then form the foundation of a TV empire in the making—not at the same scale as, and radically different in content from, the Shonda Rhimeses and Ryan Murphys of the world, but certainly on the same spectrum...Across both film and TV, the typical Sheridan property has a remarkably consistent outline: firm genre roots, operatic violence, and a pointed focus on America’s interior. (There are also consistent players: Renner, Jon Bernthal, and Aiden Gillen have all appeared in multiple Sheridan projects.) The latter also forms the basis of Sheridan’s own persona as advanced in profiles and interviews."
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TOPICS: Taylor Sheridan, Paramount+, Paramount Network, 1883, The Last Cowboy, Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Yellowstone, Janie Bryant, Costume Design