It’s no secret that Yellowstone creator, Taylor Sheridan, has no love for critics, studio executives, or pretty much any part of the corporate Hollywood apparatus. He’s said it multiple times across different interviews, and he’s even made it perfectly clear that he couldn’t care less about what any executive thinks about his storyline, his character development, or how long a series is “supposed” to go.
Earlier this year, Sheridan sat down with Tom McCutcheon’s THE SHOW, and explained why he actually intentionally seeks out bad reviews from critics. How does he manage to do that with current series like Landman, or past shows like Yellowstone? It’s simple really… he’s just trying to trigger the TV critics and Hollywood executives that are watching. Sheridan says he purposefully fills up his shows with little things that are meant to get under the skin of those whose job is to dissect what he’s created:
“‘Yellowstone,’ there’s a lot of petulance in there, and lot of things that are digs at my business that only my business is aware of being a dig. I stick a lot of them in ‘Landman’ too. I stick a lot of them in a number of other things too. I should have trigger warnings on my shows (that read), ‘If you are a television critic or a Hollywood executive, this is meant to traumatize you. I’m trying to piss you off. If you think I’m trying to piss you off, you’re exactly right. I am trying to piss you off.’
As he explained later in the interview, the Yellowstone creator believes in the “any publicity is good publicity” mentality. The way he sees it, if someone tries to review bomb a movie or show of his, it’s only going to spark more curiosity in the viewer, and likely lead them to watch anyways:
“The madder you are, the madder your review will be. The more people read it, the more curious they’ll be. Every time I get a bad review, I’m like, ‘Thank you.'”
Think of Landman moments like Ainsley’s non-binary roommate, Tommy Norris’ takedown of wind energy, or in Yellowstone when John Dutton dropped a knowledge bomb on that vegan activist about how many animals actually die harvesting a field. All relatively minor plot moments that sparked massive cultural conversations, angered left-leaning TV critics (because all of them are) and got people talking about the show… whether they watched it or not.
But in a new conversation with Bill Simmons, Sheridan doubled down and explained why he really doesn’t care what any Hollywood executive or critic thinks, and it really comes down to two things: 1) He’s not doing it for awards. And 2) these executives don’t actually know anything about storytelling, so he refuses to let them dictate anything about the story.
These days, in our low-attention, social media-addicted, glued to our cellphones society, movies and TV shows will often reexplain what is actually happening in the movies multiple times to keep viewers informed (because they don’t actually watch the movies close enough). This is common in Marvel movies, but perhaps the beast example was the last season of Stranger Things. At least once an episode the characters all huddle up and lay out “the plan,” but what’s really happening is the writers are using character dialogue to recap and explain the plot because most people at home on their couch don’t pay attention long enough to follow it for themselves. I find it terribly annoying, and Sheridan refuses to participate in that:
“I knew when I started writing [I wanted] to simply not do what everyone else was doing. What everyone else was doing was taking shortcuts, essentially breaking all the very basic fundamental rules of storytelling, because they couldn’t figure out their story,. With a movie, you’re supposed to show me what’s happening. The camera is supposed to move the story. The dialogue is supposed to tell me how the people in this world feel about what’s happening or what they hope to do or what they wish they hadn’t done or had done.”
He then tears into the know-nothing executives who have no background in the arts or storytelling. He says most of them worked their way up from the marketing department or wanted to be agents and failed. They don’t see filmmaking as art, they see it as messaging and marketing:
“It didn’t used to be this way when Steve McQueen was a movie star at Paramount and Bobby Evans ran the studio because writers were turned loose. Directors were turned completely loose. There weren’t endless rewrites. There weren’t meetings with executives about tone and mood and all this nonsense. You didn’t have a lot of people.
By the way, the studio executives and the network executives, these are marketing executives for the most part. Or maybe they studied law or whatever. Then they came and they got a job in the mailroom at CAA or WME and hated that sh*t. So, then they ended up as an intern at some network. Then through attrition, they find themselves the head of development. Well, what do you know about developing story? You know nothing. So they get terrified, panicked that the audience won’t get it because they actually have no storytellers.
Our business, at this point, is truly governed by these executives because they’re the ones that are going to determine whether or not your script is going to go into production. They’re going to try and control every element of that.”
When Sheridan signed his deal at Paramount, he wasn’t playing that game at all. He laid down the law from the very beginning telling them to give him his budget and leave him alone, and that he would turn Paramount into a streaming giant with some of the best television shows around. Awards shows be damned, Emmys be damned, scoring political points with the woke coastal elites definitely be damned. And it worked… times a hundred.
He continues:
“This is not a democracy. There’s no committee. You’re going to pay me and you’re going to give me a bunch of money, and I’m going to deliver you these shows. I’m pretty common and I’m going to tell stories that common people are going to understand. That’s most of America. You’re not going to win no Emmys with me, but I’m not trying to win Emmys. That’s not my goal. My goal is to sit somebody on their couch and move them, make them think, make them laugh, scare the sh*t out of them, excite them. That’s what I want to do, because that’s what I want from a show.”
Of course, it’s one thing to tell executives to kick rocks, but critics are a different animal. With the execs, all they really care about is the bottom line, so the second you start having success, they’ll let you steer the ship. But when it comes to critics, they’ll just continue to hate you, doubling down with every ne show you pump out. And for them, Sheridan a nice, 4-letter word for them:
“The critics are going to come after me. I’m underutilizing, can’t write for women, all this nonsense. Then I’m going to kill your husband and you’re going to have to run the oil company. I don’t care what they think and it annoys the sh*t out of them that I don’t care. I’ll be the first to tell you that there are things that I do that rage bait them a bit, and this is one of them. F*** ‘em, honestly.”
Well said… the second you start making art for critics, or really anyone else than yourself and your audience, you’ve already lost the plot (no pun intended). And that’s not to say that Sheridan hasn’t played the game a little bit. As Sheridan said earlier in podcast, Yellowstone was certainly only supposed to go a few seasons, and when it became super popular, they stretched it out a few extra and Costner eventually walked out. But when the prequel series 1883 garnered rave reviews, and Paramount asked what about Season 2, Sheridan told them it was a 1-season “peek” into a window in time in the great Dutton story. They were pissed. After Sam Elliott’s character shot himself, I think what was communicated was something to the effect of “what, everybody dies? There better be a f***** Season 2!” There wasn’t… but then he cranked out 1923, Dutton Ranch, and a ton of other shows… so they got over it.
Ultimately, Sheridan will move on from Paramount (for a boatload of money from NBC), and part of the reason is that he didn’t want to inject more politics into his shows, and that’s what Paramount was pushing for.
