If you’ve been watching Yellowstone since it first premiered in 2018, and you’ve since continued to give every Taylor Sheridan television drama a try, then you’ve probably noticed a few patterns. The more shows that Sheridan has under his belt, the more they feel cut from the same overly soapy dramatic cloth, complete with similar structures, characters, and themes. But after all this time, we continue to wonder if this trademark style, seen again most recently in Landman, which just began its second season on Paramount, indicates a clichéd trap for the filmmaker.
Taylor Sheridan Continues to Fall into the Same Narrative Pitfalls
Image via Paramount Network
As fans online have wasted no time pointing out, many of Sheridan’s biggest shows — Yellowstone, Landman, Tulsa King, etc. — follow the same basic formula. Sure, they’re set in different places and follow different sorts of people, but they all seem to feel like the same show. Sheridan is the king of introducing unlikable leading characters that we’ll be stuck with through seasons on end, forced to endure yet another liberal helping of sanctimonious monologues by characters you’d never ask for directions from, let alone familiar, political, or business advice. Most of the time, you can skip them entirely and still get the point, with Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) becoming the worst offender by Yellowstone‘s end.
When it comes to the basic plots, Sheridan recycles them like clockwork. Although set in different parts of the country and dealing with different industries entirely, Yellowstone and Landman in particular are far more similar than they are unique. Each follows a grumpy old man trying to secure his family’s livelihood by putting himself between the encroaching forces threatening to destroy what he’s worked for decades to build. At the same time, he deals with an abrasive woman in his life (either a daughter or an ex-wife) who puts him completely on edge and threatens to blow everything up due to her impulsive nature, and a son who has rebelled against his father’s wishes, falling in love with a woman he expressly told him not to. (And let’s not forget the newcomer who knows nothing about the industry but dreams big anyhow.) And that’s not to mention that an important character or family member will likely be killed almost instantly in the first episode, only to be largely forgotten about afterward. We can see bits and pieces of this same template in Sheridan’s other shows, including Tulsa King, Mayor of Kingstown, and even 1923.
Even shows that feel remarkably different from Sheridan’s usual neo-Western/crime fare, like the spy drama Lioness, still manage to pull from his other works. While the first season was unique by comparison, the main plot of Lioness Season 2 focuses largely on U.S.-Mexico border politics that feel like they were copied and pasted from his previous efforts with the Sicario films — and it’s not the first time. The very first episode of Yellowstone ends with Beth asking her father, John Dutton (Kevin Costner), who she should be fighting. “Everyone,” he replies. While it’s a fine line that makes sense considering the context, it feels quite lazy when we realize he wrote the same exchange for Sicario: Day of the Soldado, where Benicio del Toro‘s Alejandro asks Josh Brolin‘s Matt Graver who he’s going to start a war with. Can you guess Brolin’s reply? This is just one example of a reused line (“You’d think there are ten of me,” anyone?), but just as Sheridan often reuses the same faces in his material, similar story ideas and dialogue stray into other projects.
Many of Taylor Sheridan’s Characters Are Cut From the Same Personality Cloth
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When someone says “a Taylor Sheridan protagonist or character,” what automatically comes to mind? Is it a smug, nihilistic, cowboy-like leading man who spends more time waxing poetic about the way things were, what used to be, and what it takes to keep the “business” afloat than anything else? There are clearly differences between John Dutton and Billy Bob Thornton‘s Tommy Norris, but each man appears to wrestle with the same things. Even Sylvester Stallone‘s Dwight Manfredi and Jeremy Renner‘s Mike McLusky fight similar battles to keep their respective empires afloat. Likewise, Ali Larter‘s Angela Norris has been compared unfavorably by many to Beth Dutton due to their shared self-centeredness, ability to exploit whoever is in their path to meet their goals, and bullheaded behavior. While Angela is arguably a shell of a character by comparison (Beth is genuinely intelligent), it’s easy to see how the two might be different sides of the same coin, with Sheridan expressing once again his struggle to write these types of female characters (though, admittedly, not all see it that way).
And this isn’t even to mention the characters that Taylor Sheridan himself plays. No matter if he’s Travis Wheatley on Yellowstoneor Cody Spears on Lioness, he makes these characters the center of attention in whatever scenes he’s writing for himself. With Travis in particular, the self-indulgence became so obvious by the end of Yellowstone Season 5 that fans everywhere were not just sick of the character, but never wanted to see Sheridan on screen again. (Although we did like him as the historical Charles Goodnight in 1883, that show is pretty stellar all around.) It’s when he writes himself these overly macho roles that we can’t help but roll our eyes. In the end, the main issue is that the vast majority of Sheridan’s characters feel like caricatures stuck in static places where they can only repeatedly make the same decisions until the show ends… Looking at you, Kayce Dutton (and we hope Luke Grimes will breathe new life into the character with the upcoming Sheridan-less Y: Marshals).
