How Taylor Sheridan’s ‘Yellowstone’ Multiverse Became a Snake Eating Its Own Tail
We’ve all heard by now that Yellowstone — the most popular show in America for whatever reason — is ending after season five. When I worked for [redacted] I was constantly writing about this show, even going so far as to try and predict when season six would come out before season five had even premiered.
Well, guys, your beloved cowboy show isn’t as beloved as you once thought, and I have to say, I feel a bit validated by this. For so long I hid my distaste for Sheridan’s work, fooling myself into thinking Yellowstone was a good show. In my defense, I tried to watch it — and 1883 — but ultimately, it’s five seasons of Taylor Sheridan jacking himself off to a Western cowboy culture that doesn’t really exist anymore.
Sheridan’s obsession with the West reminds me of America’s fetishization of the farmer. Companies and corporations use the image of the American farmer to sell their products (usually beer) and those of us who don’t live in agricultural areas buy into it completely. Country singers love the idea of hardworking farmers sweating under the hot sun on a John Deere tractor, and so do advertising firms. But, ultimately, this ideal farm life does not exist, and, worse yet, the idea is rooted in racism. Yellowstone is the same way.
Yes, there is an entire multi-season subplot involving the Broken Rock Tribe led by Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham), but the Native American element is weak at best and ignorant at its worst. Monica Dutton, a prominent Native American character, isn’t even played by a Native American actress (Kelsey Asbille has made claims that she is Cherokee, but there is no record of her being registered with the tribe. In reality, she is Chinese-American and has no link to the Cherokee Nation or any other tribe).
Yellowstone reads as an attempt at responsible and respectful storytelling when it comes to its Indigenous characters. But, once you part the veil of Sheridan’s white savior complex, you get a whole host of problems and stereotypes: Thomas Rainwater is greedy and spiteful, Monica (Kelsey Asbille) is weak and inconsequential, and Mo (Mo Brings Plenty) comes across as the strong, silent, honorable warrior. These are three “archetypes” that the film industry wants us to believe make up the entire Native population in the United States, which is blatantly false.
We get stories like this because 87% of public K-12 schools in the US teach only pre-1900 Native American history, according to a study done in 2013. Some even believe that Native Americans are people of the past. According to the Reclaiming Native Truth initiative, a 2018 survey found that 40% of 13,000 people thought that Native Americans did not exist anymore. This mindset directly translates to the stereotypes we see in modern media and have been seeing for decades.
Native women-led organization IllumiNative — which launched in response to the data collected by Reclaiming Native Truth — has a resource for the entertainment industry, a PDF that outlines and explains Native cultures, practices, and tribes so that non-Native filmmakers and writers can create both historic and modern Native characters with dignity and complexity. It’s just one of the many resources that industry professionals can use to make sure they’re not promoting harmful stereotypes.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on Native American culture, because I had the same limiting education that a lot of people had. But, I have done my own research after the fact, and I can tell you that Yellowstone is ultimately a show by ignorant white people who think they know something about the Indigenous experience, for ignorant white people who don’t know any better about the Indigenous experience, and Taylor Sheridan has outgrown his cowboy boots.
I used to constantly say that Paramount would never cancel Yellowstone, they’ll let Taylor Sheridan play it out until he decides it’s done. To literally quote myself, “Yellowstone is Paramount’s pride and joy right now […] there’s very little chance that [they are] going to cancel Yellowstone. The most plausible course of action is the network is going to let Taylor Sheridan end his series the way he wants to.”
First of all, embarrassing of me to be like that. Second of all, not true anymore. Sheridan has gone off the rails in terms of his ego and his spending, and the studio execs are getting sick of him.
Remember when he literally built 30 covered wagons for his 1883 wagon train? We oohed and ahhed over his dedication to authenticity, but at the same time, he put 78-year-old Sam Elliott through hell trying to be as authentic as possible. Elliott actually told Jefferson White on the official Yellowstone podcast, “I just remember thinking, ‘what the fuck, man, am I gonna die on this trail?’” That’s not a thought you should want your actors to have while filming.
There should be a moment — when you’re in a position of power like Sheridan is — where you take a step back and look at what you’re doing. Evidently, Taylor Sheridan doesn’t see anything wrong with the way things are going, if he ever even stopped to look at all.
Taylor Sheridan’s hubris has ultimately been his downfall. He’s bitter because no one in the entertainment industry paid much attention to him when he was an actor, and now that he’s a bigshot writer, he’s developed a God Complex that is shrouding his work in distaste and arrogance.
Sheridan prides himself on his work ethic. He refused to sell the first iteration of The Mayor of Kingstown because networks wanted to bring in another team of writers to work on it with him. He rejected them, according to a feature by James Hibberd of The Hollywood Reporter. This level of isolation in the writing process leads to Yellowstone, where Sheridan writes “10-hour movies” for each season and breaks them up into hour-long episodes. “I am going to tell my stories my way,” he told THR. “There’s no compromising.”
He won’t compromise on story, and he won’t compromise on budget. He writes all of Yellowstone’s episodes himself, after trying and failing to work with a writer’s room. He wrote 1883 himself as well, telling THR, “If you don’t grow up in this [ranching] world, and if you’re not a history fanatic, how do you write 1883? How does a room do that? It doesn’t.”
Isolating yourself and writing your little cowboy stories is one way to do it, but you can’t work through every issue on your own. There’s something to be said for collaboration, which is why writer’s rooms exist. There has to be someone to workshop your piece with, who can say “this isn’t working” or “follow this plotline instead.” What Sheridan has created is an environment where everything he says, goes, and there’s no room for collaboration, questioning, or brainstorming. It’s dull at the least and hostile at the most.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sheridan has a sort of “cabinet” he built in Wyoming that he writes in, completely isolated. He writes a script in “8 to 10 hours,” gets no notes from Paramount, and when he watches the episodes once they’re shot and edited, he feels confident that there’s nothing he would change in his script. They’re played exactly as they’re written: no collaboration, no room for actor interpretation. Just Taylor Sheridan’s words as if he chiseled them in stone.
“The freedom of the artist to create must be unfettered,” said Sheridan. “[If] I have to check in creatively with others for a story I’ve wholly built in my brain, that would probably be the end of me telling TV stories.”
That’s a little dramatic, to be completely honest. If the idea of collaborating creatively with multiple writers makes you want to quit the TV business, then maybe the TV business wasn’t for you in the first place. Write novels, maybe.
Admittedly, it’s easy to get sucked into Sheridan’s worldview. He has a continued passion for his projects, that’s clear, and he’s not shy about sharing it. He’s blunt, straightforward, and old school, and that lends itself to his macho cowboy persona. But, he also sees himself as the last defense of a culture that doesn’t really exist anymore, not in the way he wants it to. The world is moving on, and Yellowstone is stuck firmly in an outdated idea of what it means to be a cowboy and a rancher.
He’s also grossly misguided about the impact that his 2017 movie Wind River had on the Bureau of Indian Affairs legislature. “[Wind River] actually changed a law, where you can now be prosecuted if you’re a U.S. citizen for committing rape on an Indian reservation, and there’s now a database for missing murdered Indigenous women,” he told THR.
Yes, Wind River’s plot focused on a loophole in reservation law enforcement, but it didn’t really have anything to do with changing the laws. President Biden updated the original 1994 Violence Against Women Act in 2022. With the update, tribal law enforcement can now prosecute non-Native people for “sexual violence, child abuse, sex trafficking, and assaults on tribal police officers,” according to a report from KOSU-NPR.
“The historic tribal provisions in this bill attest to years of powerful, collaborative efforts between survivors, tribal leaders, and allies across Indian Country,” said President Fawn Sharp of the National Congress of American Indians.
Additionally, U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland — herself a registered member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe — created the Bureau of Indian Affairs Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women database in 2021. Yet, Annita Lucchesi — of Cheyenne descent — created the Sovereign Bodies Institute Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women database in 2015.
The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis has been an issue for decades, way before Taylor Sheridan decided to make his white savior movie. For him to claim that Wind River “changed a law” is undermining the work that actual Native people have done to turn these issues into impactful legislature.
Here’s what I want you to take away from this: if you’re determined to do things alone, you’re going to develop a complex. You will either feel like everything you do is shit, or everything you do is the greatest thing in the world. I think we can all agree that Taylor Sheridan falls firmly in the latter camp.
This isn’t to say that Yellowstone has no merit at all. Most likely it’s brought the environmental and developmental crises in Montana to the forefront of people’s minds. Kelly Reilly, who plays Beth Dutton, has spoken about billionaires coming to Montana and buying up the land, but, really, Yellowstone itself has a lot to do with that.
I previously wrote about this concept in the above-linked article, citing a study done by MSU Billings. “Home prices in Missoula, Montana increased 20.5 percent in 2021, with 75 percent of real estate agents dealing with a majority of buyers from California,” to quote myself again. Residents and locals are being pushed out of their neighborhoods and off their land because of these transplants, mostly from California. They watch Yellowstone and they want to live like the Duttons with the big ranch and the horses and the endless Montana sky. So, they build their dream homes there, and the value of the surrounding areas skyrockets. Suddenly, people who have lived in Montana all their lives can’t afford it anymore.
This is an issue that Yellowstone addresses in season one, but the focus is so much on John Dutton (Kevin Costner) trying to preserve his own way of life that the audience gets mixed messages. Essentially, John Dutton is part of the problem; he’s one of those rich guys driving up housing prices in Yellowstone’s version of Montana, and Taylor Sheridan is complicit in that just by the fact that he created him.
Yes, Yellowstone filming on location in Montana has brought in a lot of money to the state, but at the cost of its preserved beauty and solitude. When people initially moved to Montana, they did so to escape urban life. Now, the cities are crowded and the land is being bought up at an alarming rate. Economically, Montana is doing great. Environmentally, it’s suffering. There’s a pale horse galloping across the last of Montana’s open land, and Taylor Sheridan sits firmly astride it.
