Full transcript. Listen on the Taylor Sheridan page.
0:00 Welcome back to the Deep Dive.
0:01 Today we are doing something a little different.
0:04 A little bit, yeah.
0:05 Usually we take a big topic, you know, AI, geopolitics, supply chains, and we break it down.
0:10 But today we're taking a, a whole stack of research articles, critical theory, sociological analysis, and we are aiming it squarely at one human being, one very prolific human being.
0:24 That's the word.
0:25 We are talking about the man who, and this is true, essentially bought final draft screenwriting software at age 40, having never written a script before in his life, and then proceeded.
0:36 To completely rewrite the rules of modern television.
0:39 We were talking about Taylor Sheridan.
0:40 Taylor Sheridan, and look, this is a massive topic.
0:42 I think what makes this deep dive so compelling and why we have so much to get through today is that we aren't just reviewing TV shows, right?
0:49 We're not here to give a thumbs up or thumbs down on Yellowstone.
0:52 We're not telling you if it's good or bad in that, you know, subjective sense.
0:56 We are looking at these shows as massive cultural artifacts.
1:00 I mean, they're phenomena.
1:01 Exactly.
1:03 We're treating this whole thing like a graduate level master class.
1:06 We want to understand the mechanics of his storytelling, the actual nuts and bolts of how he writes these scenes that just glue people to the screen.
1:14 But we also, and this is key, we also want to understand the philosophical worldview that's humming underneath it all, right?
1:21 Because when you look at the numbers, you immediately run into what our research calls the Sheridan paradox.
1:27 The Sheridan paradox is the perfect place to start.
1:30 It really is the elephant in the room when you talk about his work.
1:33 OK, so lay it out for us.
1:35 What is the paradox?
1:36 Well, on one hand, you have Taylor Sheridan, who is, and this is not an exaggeration, arguably the most commercially dominant showrunner working today.
1:45 I mean, the output alone is staggering.
1:47 The numbers are wild.
1:47 We are talking about over 100 hours of produced content in a very, very short window of time.
1:53 At his peak.
1:55 He had 7 7- concurrent series on the air.
1:58 I can't even get my head around that.
2:00 7 shows at once.
2:01 And he has a deal with NBC Universal and Paramount that is valued by some estimates.
2:07 In the billions.
2:08 He's not just a writer, he's an industry, and the audience numbers, they're honestly staggering.
2:13 I saw one statistic that the Yellowstone series finale, 11.4 million viewers, 11.4 million.
2:19 In today's fractured landscape of streaming, where a hit show might get what, a million views, 2 million, 11.4 is that's Super Bowl territory.
2:27 It's 1980s network TV numbers.
2:29 It's an unheard of level of audience capture in the modern era.
2:33 He has the audience completely.
2:35 So that's one side of the paradox.
2:37 OK.
2:37 So what's the other side?
2:38 The other side is the critical reception, specifically from the awards bodies.
2:42 Despite having the top five shows on Paramount Plus Scanwit.
2:45 Despite absolutely defining the water cooler conversation for a huge chunk of the country, he has received 0 major Emmy nominations for writing or showrunning any of these massive hits.
2:56 0.
2:56 It's a complete disconnect.
2:58 Massive commercial success, huge cultural footprint, and crickets from the major awards.
3:02 That is the paradox.
3:03 And you know, there's this classic narrative that pops up in the media to explain this, the red state versus blue state divide.
3:10 Of course the easy take is that Yellowstone is red state TV.
3:15 It's conservative dad TV and so the coastal critics just turn up their noses and dismiss it.
3:20 And our sources argue that this is just way too simplistic.
3:23 It's a lazy explanation.
3:24 It's so much deeper than just politics.
3:26 It's much deeper.
3:27 I mean, if you dismiss Sheridan as just writing conservative fantasy, you completely miss the actual and I would say quite radical sociological critique that's happening in his work.
3:38 That's what I want to get into.
3:39 His work is a study of institutions.
3:41 It's about how they fail, how they corrupt.
3:44 And what happens to the human animal when the structures that are supposed to hold society together just crumble.
3:51 So that is our mission for today.
3:52 We are going to unpack the Sheridan method of writing, the actual craft, the technique.
3:58 We'll analyze his incredible film trilogy and his sprawling TV universe.
4:03 And we're going to dig into the heavy hitters, you know, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Patrick Wolf, to explain why these stories about cowboys.
4:10 Oilmen and power brokers resonate so deeply in the 2020s, but I think to really understand the method you have to understand where the man came from, because this is not a guy who went to film school at NYU.
4:22 No, not at all.
4:23 He didn't come up through the traditional writers' room system paying his dues.
4:27 I know his origin story is honestly one of the best parts of the research because it's so completely counterintuitive.
4:33 He calls it his anti-school of screenwriting, right?
4:36 It's foundational.
4:37 So he spent 17 years as a working actor, and we have to be really clear here.
4:41 He wasn't a star.
4:42 He was a that guy actor.
4:44 I know exactly the type.
4:45 He was the 3rd cop on the left in an episode of CSI.
4:48 He was Deputy Hale on Sons of Anarchy.
4:50 He was in the trenches of network television day in, day out, and he says that during those 17 years, he got a, what was the quote, a 20 year education on how not to do it.
5:00 I love that quote.
5:01 It's so telling.
5:02 Another one he uses is, I have absolutely no idea how to do this, but I know exactly what I hate.
5:07 And think about what that does to a person's creative mind.
5:11 For nearly two decades, his job was reading scripts where characters would just explain the plot to each other.
5:16 He sat in table reads where the dialogue was just lazy exposition.
5:21 As you know, Bob, the nuclear codes are in the briefcase.
5:24 That exact kind of writing, he saw firsthand how plot-driven scripts would force characters to do incredibly stupid things just to move the story from point A to point B.
5:34 It created a visceral rejection of conventional storytelling.
5:38 It wasn't some intellectual choice he made.
5:40 The research suggests it was a genuine physical allergic reaction to bad craft.
5:46 Exactly, and that context is so crucial.
5:48 He didn't even buy screenwriting software until he was 40 years old.
5:51 He was broke.
5:52 His wife was pregnant.
5:53 He had just quit acting in frustration over his pay, and he sat down and wrote his first screenplay, which Became Sicario essentially overnight out of desperation and then he followed it up by writing Hell or High Water in 3 weeks.
6:05 3 weeks with no outline.
6:07 That part just blows my mind.
6:08 No outline, no index cards on a wall, and that speed, that intensity, it comes directly from that rejection of overthinking and over plotting.
6:17 He wants to strip everything down to the absolute bone.
6:20 So let's get into that.
6:22 Let's unpack part one of our deep dive today, the Sheridan method.
6:26 If we're looking for lessons here, for takeaways, what is the core philosophy?
6:30 The core philosophy is on the surface, deceptively simple strip the plot bare and let the characters drive absolutely everything.
6:39 Sheridan explicitly says he looks for absurdly simple plots.
6:42 OK, so give me an example of an absurdly simple plot in his world.
6:46 A bank robbery, a murder investigation, a family defending a ranch.
6:51 That's it.
6:51 That's the entire pitch in one sentence.
6:53 That's so interesting because modern TV, especially what we call prestige TV, is usually trying to be as complex and convoluted as possible.
7:00 I mean, look at Westworld or some of the later seasons of Game of Thrones.
7:03 Yes, it's all about the puzzle box, right?
7:05 Multiple timelines, hidden identities, Easter eggs for Reddit to dissect, precisely.
7:11 And Sheridan just goes the complete opposite direction.
7:14 He believes that if the plot is simple, the audience doesn't have to burn what he calls brain calories tracking who has the microchip or which timeline are we in right now, and that frees up space.
7:24 It frees up all the narrative space for what he actually cares about character psychology and moral texture.
7:31 So the lesson really is that complexity and plot can often just be a mask for a lack of depth and character.
7:37 That's the Sheridan take 100%.
7:39 The central mantra is.
7:41 Stories should be driven by characters, not characters driven by plot.
7:46 If a character does something, it absolutely must be because that specific person with their history and their wounds would do it.
7:54 Not because the writer needs an explosion to happen in Act 3.
7:57 Exactly right.
7:57 That's a lazy way out for him.
7:59 The notes mention he has 3 specific mantras that kind of guide this whole philosophy.
8:03 Yeah, and these are great rules for any writer or storyteller, really.
8:06 The first one is simple.
8:07 Write the movie you'd pay to see.
8:09 Start with yourself.
8:10 Makes sense.
8:11 The second one is, always have the audience wondering what happens next, never what's happening now.
8:16 Oh, that distinction is huge.
8:19 Never wondering what is happening now.
8:21 That's a plea for clarity.
8:22 It is.
8:23 He's saying confusion is not the same thing as depth.
8:25 Don't mistake them.
8:26 But the third rule for me is the big one.
8:28 This is the core of his style, which is never let a character tell you something the camera can show.
8:33 OK, so that sounds like show don't tell, which is, you know, the oldest advice in the creative writing book, but the sources say he takes this to a real extreme.
8:43 He does.
8:44 The research calls it his allergy to exposition.
8:46 It's almost a phobia.
8:48 If you read a Sheridan script or if you watch his work very closely, you'll start to notice things.
8:54 Characters almost never say hello or goodbye.
8:56 I never noticed that, but you're right.
8:58 They rarely say a simple yes or no if there's a more interesting way to convey that answer through an action or a look or just silence.
9:06 It creates this incredibly intense clipped style of dialogue.
9:10 It feels very, well, very cowboy, very stoic, but you're saying it serves a specific narrative function.
9:15 It forces the audience to lean in.
9:18 It's an active viewing experience.
9:20 If the character isn't going to explain how they feel about something, you have to watch their eyes.
9:26 You have to watch how they hold their hands.
9:27 You have to listen to what they don't say.
9:30 It engages the viewer actively rather than passively.
9:32 It trusts the audience.
9:34 It treats the audience as intelligent partners in the story.
9:37 And speaking of visual storytelling, we absolutely have to talk about the setting because in Sheridan's world, the landscape isn't just a pretty backdrop for the drama.
9:46 No, not at all.
9:47 The landscape is a character.
9:48 In fact, I'd argue it's often the primary antagonist of the story.
9:52 The source material mentions a really specific visual ratio that was used in the film Wind River.
9:58 I found this absolutely fascinating.
10:00 Yes, this was a deliberate choice by him as the director.
10:03 In Wind River, they framed the shots so that the actors, the human beings, only occupied the bottom 1/3 of the frame, just the bottom third.
10:11 The other 2/3 of the screen with the landscape, the brutal snow, the jagged mountains, the vast indifferent gray sky.
10:18 That is such a bold artistic choice.
10:21 What does that communicate to the viewer on a subconscious level?
10:24 It's a visual thesis statement for his whole worldview.
10:26 It says, the geography dictates your fate.
10:29 You are small.
10:30 The world is big and unforgiving, and frankly indifferent to your survival.
10:35 Doesn't matter how tough you think you are, the mountain is always tougher.
10:39 And there's even a color theory at play in his costuming and production design, right?
10:42 A very consistent one.
10:43 Generally his characters wear earth tones, greens, browns, tans, grays.
10:48 They blend into the landscape.
10:50 They're part of the natural ecosystem for good or ill, but it uses pops of color very deliberately, very bright colors when they appear often signal hope, which is usually a very dangerous illusion in his world.
11:03 It's a sign that someone doesn't understand the rules, and red.
11:06 Well, red, unsurprisingly, almost always represents violence, an intrusion, a wound on the landscape.
11:12 OK, so we have the method, Simple plots, character-driven action, and allergy to exposition, and the land as a crushing deterministic weight.
11:20 Now let's see how that plays out in execution.
11:22 Let's move to part two, the film trilogy.
[Transcript continues with film trilogy (Sicario, Hell or High Water, Wind River), TV universe (Yellowstone, 1883, Mayor of Kingstown, Landman), graduate-level themes (failed father, loyalty over law, grief as permanent), theoretical anchors (Weber, Arendt, Patrick Wolfe, Girard), critiques (native agency, labor, gender), and closing challenge. Full episode available in audio above.]
37:20 So my challenge to you is this Watch these shows.
37:23 They are brilliant television.
37:24 They are master classes in storytelling craft.
37:27 But watch them as a curriculum for asking how power operates, not as a manual for how it must operate.
37:34 That is a fantastic and challenging place to leave it.
37:37 A huge thank you to everyone listening to this deep dive.