Yellowstone, 1923, Landman, Lioness, Special Ops: Lioness, Tulsa King: one writer runs them all, and he does it from a Texas ranch instead of a studio lot. No Emmy campaigns, no critics to please, and Paramount can’t afford to lose him.
Taylor Sheridan produces enough television to keep Paramount’s streaming business standing, and he does it without most of the machinery Hollywood treats as mandatory. His shows skip the Emmy campaigns, the critical-favor trading, and the studio-lot workflow that usually decide who gets to make TV at this scale.
He built the whole thing his own way. Sheridan writes from a working ranch, casts against type on purpose, and has said he plants moments in his shows just to wind up the critics who pick them apart. He pointed to casting Demi Moore as basically an extra in “Landman” Season 1, then killing off her character’s husband to make her a bigger player in Season 2.
The empire keeps expanding. “Lioness” returned for its third season on Aug. 2 with Zoe Saldaña, and the CBS spin-off “Marshals,” built around Luke Grimes’ Kayce Dutton from “Yellowstone,” returns this fall.
The New York Post laid out the math behind the $1 billion figure, the point being that none of it ran through the usual gatekeepers.
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