by Jacob Harrington, Contributor

In 2021, writer/director/man of the West Taylor Sheridan was inducted into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame. His journey from supporting actor to screenwriter to director to television empire showrunner has been meteoric, but there is no doubt that he put in the work to make it happen. Today, I am going to focus on his series 1883, his best show and a genuinely fantastic season of TV. But 1883 is just one little cornerstone of his television empire. Sheridan has been building his deck of cards up for awhile. There is a lot to cover in that deck. 

Sheridan has a solid track record of making “red state” entertainment that the rest of Hollywood could not be less interested in. He mostly stays neutral on actual modern politics. I would not call it a balancing act. He is not making right wing ultra-conservative entertainment. He is making films and television about people in areas that otherwise are not being covered or made very often or at all.

The themes he explores and revisits are not your average Hollywood material. His work is critical and questioning of America. The gentrification of the West, the historical and modern treatment of Native Americans, ranching and land ownership, systematic corruption in law enforcement, the drug war, the little guy getting screwed over by a giant system, systematic racism, freedom, the history of the United States being violent, exploitative and bloody–Sheridan has got a lot on his mind. He is interested in the ugly reality behind America’s myth. He wants America to be better than it is, a bleeding heart liberal sentiment. I am not going to speculate about his personal politics. His work loudly and clearly speaks for itself. 

Paramount+ has emerged from the ashes of CBS All Access to become a full fledged competitor in the streaming wars, leaving only Sony as the one big studio that has not started a streaming service. Paramount’s slogan for the service is “a mountain of entertainment!”. A mountain that is made up of Star Trek, Nickelodeon cartoons and properties, CBS procedurals, Halo and Master Chief. Taylor Sheridan as a persona is not quite so easily recognizable, but he is quite a big part of Paramount’s mountain of entertainment. 

Sheridan broke through acting on Sons Of Anarchy and Veronica Mars. His first film as a screenwriter was the surprise hit Sicario. Denis Villenueve truly knocked it out of the park directing-wise and elevated the script’s material into a stark, chilling tale of corruption and institutional rot along the US/Mexico border. The script lays out all of Sheridan’s themes that he has continued to examine. The sequel to Sicario did not turn out so well–that film is a huge misfire, with a script that leaned too much on Trump era politics and ugliness.

Then comes 2016’s Hell Or High Water, written by Sheridan and directed by David Mackenzie. The script made a big splash and was on the Blacklist in 2012. Hell Or High Water is one of the best westerns produced in the last two decades, and I distinctly remember watching it the night before the 2016 election–a great to film to watch when pondering the past and future of America. I would call this film a modern classic. The last scene between Chris Pine and Jeff Bridges is truly perfect western stuff, aching with loss and a promise of future retribution, set against a Texas plain where oil pumps move up and down in the background. Hell Or High Water has all of Sheridan’s frequent themes distilled into a perfect package. 

Sheridan finally moves over to directing with 2017’s Wind River, starring Jeremy Renner and Elisabeth Olsen. This movie is pretty good. The casting of Renner, a white man in touch with nature and the West who gets involved in a murder investigation on an Indian Reservation, is intentional. He’s supposed to not belong. It’s also a flaw the film never really moves past. Renner is distracting here. The story deals with a lot of heavy themes involving the history of Native Americans and the many ways this country has done them wrong over centuries. I am not sure Jeremy Renner is the best leading man to center that story around. The subject material is uncomfortable and harsh, so this one did not make as big of an impact as Hell Or High Water, nor is it as good or powerful as that film. It is a pretty good film and Renner and Olsen are both excellent in it. 

Just last year we got Sheridan’s second directorial effort, Those Who Wish Me Dead, starring Angelina Jolie, released into theaters and streaming on HBO Max. I am not going to go long on this movie because of how recent it is, but I really liked it a lot. Jolie is a wild fire forest ranger dealing with guilt and trauma stemming from a horrible wildfire. She comes across a young boy fleeing assassins who are trying to kill the kid to stamp out some vast reaching conspiracy that will take down many powerful people. If this movie had been made in the 1980’s it would probably star Stallone. 

In 2017 Sheridan creates Yellowstone, and now we’re off to the races. Yellowstone is America’s favorite television show, as It is the only scripted cable show to grow its audience year after year, making it a huge ratings hit. It is highly watchable, pulpy, entertaining television. It is also a very silly and highly repetitive soap opera. So many dramatic twists, turns, revelations, betrayals, schemes, and straight up murders occur in each season that it makes other shows seem boring. Dozens of people die. Someone is always trying to take the Dutton family’s land. Kevin Costner is the weary cowboy patriarch whose families’ legacy is this massive ranch. His children are all leading thoroughly messy and dramatic lives. Enemies come and go and die off and get replaced. There are lots of cows and horses and ranch problems. It is not bad at all. But it is thoroughly repetitive soap opera television. Which is maybe why it is an enormous runaway hit that has spawned two spin-offs. I will come back to that in a moment. Yellowstone is every network’s dream. It has tons of buzz and a growing niche audience, it’s gotten steadily rising critical acclaim, and it is not super expensive to make. The recent season four finale was viewed live by 9.3 million people, the most viewed cable broadcast since 2017.

Yellowstone airs on the Paramount network, the film studio’s cable channel that mostly airs movies. The studio decided they needed to get the show streaming somewhere as soon as possible in 2020, perhaps spurned by the pandemic with streaming becoming America’s #1 coping method. So Paramount sold the streaming rights for the show to Peacock. You can watch the past seasons of the show on Peacock, but not on Paramount+. You can watch the new and future seasons on the Paramount channel, but not on Paramount+. Viacom and Paramount probably made a ton of money by selling the rights to Peacock. But the more of a success that Yellowstone becomes as people discover the previous seasons on streaming, the more it benefits Peacock/Universal/NBC/Comcast, Paramount/Viacom’s direct competitor.

Paramount, realizing how much of a creative asset that they had in Taylor Sheridan and his appeal to underserved audiences, quickly signed him to a development deal for original television series exclusive to their streaming service. Essentially letting him have a second, third, and fourth go at creating a show that would become as big a hit as Yellowstone, and this time they would keep the streaming rights. Sheridan was given a blank check to bolster Paramount+’s streaming library. 

This is where the fun begins. 

Sheridan’s first new original show that is exclusive to the app premiered in late 2021 - Mayor Of Kingstown, starring Jeremy Renner, Kyle Chandler, and Dianne Wiest. It is a relentlessly bleak crime drama about two brothers who are power brokers in a town that has multiple federal prisons in it. The incarceration system employs the town. It is a grim, gritty mix of The Wire and Oz. It’s entertaining but it is not particularly great. Renner, however, is excellent in it and it’s nice to see him in a role like this, a little unhinged and vicious, in way over his head, and frequently funny and very human. 

The show’s depiction of prison guards and lawmen is ugly. I do not think that Sheridan is trying to create media that so heavily features cops and law enforcement because he thinks they are cool and good at their jobs. I think he is fascinated by the systemic issues that have caused institutional decay. In this show, the police are a pretty vicious and brutal gang. There are no good guys here. The main female character is a doe eyed, young and beautiful sex worker who is abused and later rescued. I think the plot line ultimately works, but that does not excuse its blatant exploitation and discomfort and I suspect many viewers would take issue with it. Again, Sheridan is angry about the history of this country and how it got to where it is today.  As ugly, brutal and grim as this show is, it is about a very real and uniquely American situation. The American prison system is a horrible, exploitative, ugly reality. A show about its inner workings must be too.

Sheridan has one more spinoff in development called 6666, pronounced “Four Sixes”. In season four of Yellowstone, one of the supporting characters suffers an injury while during rodeo riding. As he is recovering, Costner’s John Dutton sends the character to learn the true ways of the cowboy down at the Four Sixes. This character is escorted to Four Sixes by another recurring character who does rodeo and sells horses to Dutton and his ranch, a character played by none other than Taylor Sheridan. Like M. Night Shyamalan’s character driving the family to the beach that makes them old in Old, Sheridan drives this character to Texas, and simultaneously sets up his next spin off with a back door pilot. This supporting character, Jimmy, will be remaining at the Four Sixes and presumably leading the spinoff show. Is this supporting character interesting enough to carry his own spin off? Many Yellowstone fans are skeptical. There was a lot of horse spinning and rodeo tricks in season four. It seems like Yellowstone might up it’s stakes and focus more on Dutton family drama, giving over the day-to-day work that goes into running a ranch to the upcoming 6666.

What makes me extremely interested in this upcoming spinoff is that the Four Sixes ranch is a real ranch located in Texas. It is one of the largest ranches in the country at over 350,000 acres and it has been in operation since 1990, maintaining cattle and breeding horses. In 2020, the great-granddaughter of the founder passed away. In May 2021, an investment group purchased the ranch for $347.7 million dollars. This group was representing Taylor Sheridan, who now owns the very real 6666 ranch. The ranch continues to operate and I imagine will be where 6666 films, and a future production hub for other shows and movies Sheridan works on the future. If you’re a filmmaker who specializes in rural and Western material, owning hundreds thousands of acres relatively untouched land is a pretty ideal set up for your future. Hence the empire I referred to. It took Sheridan about a decade to get to where he is now, but I would argue that he has firmly stacked that deck of cards in his favor. Many filmmakers dreamt of but struggled to establish their own mega production headquarters - Spielberg, Lucas and Coppola, for example. George Lucas, who founded Skywalker Ranch (not a real functioning ranch) as a production headquarters, would be impressed. 

The long and dusty trail of Sheridan’s career has finally lead us back to the beginning, 1883, a prequel series to Yellowstone. Sheridan’s third original series for Paramount (6666 will be the fourth). I started watching Yellowstone at the end of last year after thoroughly enjoying the first two episodes of 1883. You absolutely do not need to watch or know anything about Yellowstone to enjoy 1883. Some of Yellowstone season four has flashbacks that feature 1883’s characters, in a cross promotional synergy effort, but they do not take away from 1883.

Whereas I said Yellowstone was a pretty silly, repetitive soap opera, the thing about 1883 is that it is tremendous. It is extremely well-written, acted and directed. It belongs in the canon of great Western television with Lonesome Dove and Deadwood. There is real artistic writing and filmmaking on display here. This is what Sheridan’s entire career has been building to, and it is his best work to date. He is able to go back to the earlier days of American history that have inspired so much of his work and apply his themes to a different time, same place. From the very beginning the history of America is violent and brutal. 

1883 seemed like a down the middle Western prequel series. We follow the great grandparents of Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone character as they head west on the Oregon trail. I expected a lot of classic Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry Western material, a lot of gun fights, and a lot of pretty landscapes. Sheridan cast country singers Faith Hill and Tim McGraw as his leading couple, James and Margaret Dutton. Sam Elliot plays a Pinkerton agent and former Union Army captain, and LaMonica Garrett as his trail partner that joins the journey West.

However, Tim McGraw and Sam Elliot–both of them looking absolutely fantastic and era-accurate–are not the leads of the series. The lead of the series is Isabel May, playing James and Margaret’s daughter Elsa Dutton. The show’s narration and perspective is 100% her’s, and that turns out to be a brilliant decision. I expected this show to be a typical Western, retaining some of the procedural drama of Yellowstone. What I did not expect was a Jane Austen inspired beautiful, romantic journey west from an eighteen year woman’s perspective. Some Yellowstone fans are not on board and have criticized the show for being so focused on a young woman’s perspective and experience, and how much romance is involved. The decision to center the series around her is why it works, and why it’s wonderful.

Isabel May gives a fierce, captivating performance that I hope will be remembered come Emmy season. Her narration is poetic and moving. We watch her start out as a timid young woman leaving East coast society and realize that she loves having left society behind. The opens plains of Kansas and Texas make her feel more alive than the even in 1883 already over crowded East coast. She has a series of revelations and experiences - learning how to herd cattle and ride - that make her go from a timid young woman to a brave, adventurous rough rider. She realizes how much she loves riding and learns to shoot. She starts wearing pants. She learns how to be a cowboy. She falls in love.

Elsa Dutton’s character arc is truly moving. 1883 is as much of a Jane Austen yearning romance on the frontier as it is a western examining the early immigrant experience. There is a wide ensemble here as Elliot and McGraw travel with a large wagon train of German immigrants departing from Fort Worth, Texas and heading to Oregon. The journey is miserable and dangerous. The numbers of the wagon train dwindle as they face bandits, rivers and rattle snakes. But all of it is shown to us from Elsa’s perspective. As hard as the trip is, she loves every second of it. She has never felt more alive than she does in the saddle on the plains. It is already deeply romantic and beautiful character arc before she falls in love.

Sheridan understands that watching two attractive people flirt and fall in love is more of a magic trick than any special effect, and it works to dazzling effect here. As Elsa learns to ride and rope and herd, she starts wearing pants and dressing like a cowboy, much to her mother’s chagrin. Her dad loves it - his daughter can ride with the best of them, and he loves seeing her personality open up and grow. She begins working with the caravan’s hired cowboys to herd a head of about 40 cattle that travel with the convoy, and along the way she begins flirting with a charming, kind cowboy named Ennis, played by Eric Nelsen. Her mother and father warn and caution her - they may be traveling the heart of the continent on wide open plains with no civilization for many miles, like a ship midway through an Atlantic voyage - but that does not mean there are no rules to follow or dangers to be wary of.

The twist on this is that Ennis turns out to be a kind, sweet and honorable man. They flirt like Jane Austen characters would if no one else could see them or judge them, far away from society and its rules. They fall in love and it is a sweeping, epic romance set against setting sunset vistas and wide open plains. Elsa loses her virginity to him one night as her mother agonizes over how fast this journey is making her daughter grow up. The next day, Elsa kills a man for the first time. 

It’s worth mentioning that first scene of the series first episode shows Elsa waking up on the ground as a wagon burns behind her. Bodies lie on the ground around her. As she asks a Native American warrior from an attacking group why they did this he responds “You did this to us.” Elsa pulls a gun and shoots him, and he shoots her with an arrow that goes right through her torso. She muses that might be already be dead, and this place might be hell. This scene hangs over every episode that follows.

Violence is an inherent part of the American West, and the history of America itself. Before they set out from Fort Worth, a drunken man stumbles into Elsa’s bedroom at an inn, and into her bed. Her father comes to the rescue. But it shows that the place they are leaving behind isn’t peaceful and perfect either. The history of this country is something that clearly fascinates Sheridan, something he examines over and over in different places and time periods. But here it gets its most thorough examination. Elsa muses at one point in her narration now they have left the East coast behind, but they are taking its traditions and rules with them. The land is wild and free, and here they come to settle it. Maybe it shouldn’t be settled. Maybe we bring this inherent violence and strife with us.

The German immigrants on this journey are miserable, and Sam Elliot’s Shea Brennan is not particularly patient or kind to them. He’s stern and rough, the way the Civil War and losing his wife and daughter to smallpox made him. The journey is made harder by nature and the sheer vastness of the distance they must cover. For some of the Germans the struggle of the journey is exacerbated by Shea’s harsh ways. Why did they leave their homes to come to this barren, violent land? 

In the second episode, a group of bandits attack the camp. When James Dutton and Shea Brennan turn to a local lawman in a nearby town for help, the lawman is eager to. James, Shea, the hired hands and Shea’s partner Thomas are capable gunfighters, but having a lawman on their side might prevent retribution and further violence. That lawman, played with very intimidating energy by Billy Bob Thornton, turns out to be a vengeful cold-blooded murderer whose sense of justice is perverse and cruel. They turn to the law, and the lawman that helps is a a far more brutal killer than the men who wronged them in the first place. The vast, free, new land that was so enticing to the immigrants and the Dutton family is already bloody and violent. It was not supposed to be like this. But it was, from the very beginning. From the moment Europeans came here. It was tainted with violence and that violence never really went away. 

In the middle episodes, things slow down and become a little repetitive as the hardships of the Oregon trail add up. But Isabel May and her performance light a fire under the story that burns extremely bright starting around episode four. Her performance is absolutely extraordinary. Her delivery of the poetic, introspective narration that Sheridan writes for is just simply beautiful. The decision to center the show around her and her experience is truly a brilliant one, and it makes this show worth watching. The excellent cameos from Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson go a long way as well.

Gorgeous cinematography and acting help elevate everything - if you thought it was a peculiar choice to cast two country musicians as the leads, you are made a fool of very early on. Tim McGraw and Faith Hill are not dragging their feet here - both of their performances are pitch perfect. None of this is easy for them. They are trying to make their lives better, and it’s hard to not wonder if the journey was just a massive mistake. 

But Isabel May is truly the standout here and her performance as Isabel is riveting. Later, she is saved from bandits by a Comanche warrior named Sam. The cinematography in this scene is stunning as she tries to outride her assailants and does not see Sam coming up behind them, arrows and axes flying from him. The camera spins around in a dizzying way as Sam battles the bandits trying to kill Elsa, mirroring her perspective, as she watches, stunned and amazed by what she sees.  She describes Sam fighting as one of the most beautiful things she’s ever seen. The depiction Native Americans may be completely off to people with more knowledge on the subject, and I admit that I have very little. I thought it was very nuanced and well done.

This performance and this character is one of the most compelling, electric things I have come across in television in quite awhile. It fully snuck up on me and moved my cold dead heart. Elsa does not want to wear dresses and find a husband. She does want to abide by the pressures and societal rules that say she cannot be a cowboy. She wants to live free on the plains. Sam the Comanche warrior calls her “Lightning With The Yellow Hair”, because her horse is fast and she has bright golden yellow blonde hair. Every time he says the nickname, I felt a little flutter. Later, she gets bright yellow riding chaps with tassels and a blue leather vest decorated by Comanche women. There is only one way to describe how she looks in this outfit: cool. She looks so cool, and comfortable, and happy. Contrast this with her trying to ride a horse in the dresses her mother wears, trying to manage all the skirts and fabric in the saddle.  We watch this character figure out who she is and fall in love and grow up. Her parents slowly reckon with the fact that they cannot stop Elsa from being who she is. James tells his wife Margaret “She’s gonna hold the hand of who she loves in front of the the whole world.” Elsa is such a bright, lively character. Elliot says as much to her father in the final episode. 

From here on out I want to keep this strictly spoiler free, as the season finale just aired on February 27th. To emphasize, you do not need to see or know or care about Yellowstone to watch 1883 and be similarly swept off your feet by it as I was. This is a very special show with narrative tricks up its sleeve that ultimately make it much more than it could have been. Sheridan wrote every episode and directed the pilot. Like his other shows, there is not really a writers room. He is steering the ship. 1883 is gorgeous, epic, moving must see television. 

A second season has already been ordered by Paramount+, to be titled 1932. Still a prequel to Yellowstone but a sequel to 1883. Sheridan has a plethora of other projects in the work and does not seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Among them are the expanded fifth season of Yellowstone, a project about Bass Reeves the legendary lawman and first black US Marshal, starring David Oyelowo. A crime show starring Sylvester Stallone called The Tulsa Man that he co-created with Terrence Winter of Boardwalk Empire. He’s got a CIA/intelligence drama with Nicole Kidman titled Lioness, and finally a drama about a fixer for an oil company starring Billy Bob Thornton called Land Man. I imagine that as often as it’s practical, these projects will film on the 6666 ranch that he now owns. This is an enormous amount of work for one person, and most of his shows do not have writers rooms and are written entirely by him. Paramount has truly given him a blank check to work with and build up their streaming offerings. 

For a filmmaker whose work is so steeped in Western iconography and influenced by Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers, the thrill is seeing him work on an actual old timey Western. As a huge fan of both Star Wars and George Lucas, I am never going to have a problem with a creator turning the dial back on time and making a prequel to their already massively successful property. It recently worked to great effort with long awaited sequel to Red Dead Redemption being a prequel that bookended the first game perfectly. Without dismissing his earlier work, I think 1883 is far and away his best work and the work that his filmography so far has lead him to. I imagine a third prequel season set approximately 40 years after 1932 will follow featuring Costner’s John Dutton as a child. A complete circle.

1883 is an incredible season of television and a tremendous artistic accomplishment. It deserves writing, acting, directing and limited series Emmy nominations come summer 2022. Sheridan has so far had a fascinating career and built up an impressive filmography examining the uglier side of Americana. I think he is a very unique voice in mainstream filmmaking. After watching all four season of Yellowstone, 1883 and Mayor Of Kingstown all within a few weeks of each other and with quite a bit of overlap, I feel like I understand Sheridan pretty well. In both Yellowstone and Mayor Of Kingstown there are nearly identical scenes where Costner/Renner tell their scene partner that the location they’re about to arrive in is their favorite place in the world. The character they’re speaking to asks why. Costner/Renner shows them their cell phone as begins to say “no service” on the screen, and responds “That’s why.”