How Taylor Sheridan Created America’s Most Popular TV Show

“You’re not ready for this.”

It was early 2017, and Taylor Sheridan stood before Viacom executives describing Yellowstone, the television series he had conceived with the producer John Linson. Sheridan had sold it to HBO some years before, only to see it languish, as so many projects do. But now it was close to finally being seen by the world, thanks to its savior and champion—a former child actor named David Glasser, who was then an executive with the Weinstein Company.

Glasser had seen the potential in the Yellowstone script, and in Sheridan, who had left behind his career as a character actor to write full-time. He’d helped Sheridan pry the show from HBO—taking Yellowstone to potential alternative suitors, from whom he’d gotten a series of polite, and not so polite, passes. Still, he had pressed on.

Finally, Glasser had attracted some interest. Viacom was preparing to launch a new cable channel, the Paramount Network, and it needed original shows. The executives wanted Yellowstone.

Sheridan, however, was threatening to derail the whole thing. When Glasser had asked him to come to Hollywood for the pitch meeting, the screenwriter had at first refused to leave his home in Park City, Utah. To coax him into attending the meeting, Glasser had to fly him there by private jet and promise him that he wouldn’t have to spend the night in L.A., a city Sheridan had come to hate.

Glasser had finally gotten Sheridan in a room with Viacom executives. But what Sheridan delivered was less a pitch than a warning.

You will have no part in any of this, he told them—except for footing the bill. I will write and direct all the episodes of the show. There will be no writers’ room. There will be no notes from studio executives. No one will see an outline.

“It’s going to cost $90–$100 million,” he says he told them. “You’re going to be writing a check for horses that’s $50–$75,000 a week.” You really want to do this?

They were crazy to accept Sheridan’s terms. But they were impressed by the cut Glasser had shown them of Wind River—the third movie Sheridan had written about the contemporary American frontier, following Sicario (2015) and Hell or High Water (2016), and the first one of them he had directed. And they liked the fact that Kevin Costner had signed on to play Yellowstone’s lead character, John Dutton.

What most attracted them was the script, which in its premise and sweep had echoes of The Sopranos, but with Western trappings. Dutton, the owner of the largest contiguous ranch in Montana, finds himself, like Tony Soprano, battling members of his own family as well as forces from the outside: Native Americans who want to build a casino on the land abutting his ranch; carpetbagging developers from California and New York who want to build golf courses and a ski resort and luxury housing and a new airport and even a whole new city. Dutton is watching his way of life slip away, his family along with it, and he is willing to do anything to hold on to both, no matter how bloody the cost. (A lot of people get murdered on Yellowstone.)

“This was one of the fundamental things I wanted to look at: When you have a kingdom, and you are the king, is there such a thing as morality?” Sheridan told me when we