Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris in LandmanImage via Paramount+
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Michael John Petty
Published 59 minutes ago
Michael John Petty is a Senior Author for Collider who spends his days writing, in fellowship with his local church, and enjoying each new day with his wife and daughters. At Collider, he writes features and reviews, and has interviewed the cast and crew of Dark Winds. In addition to writing about stories, Michael has told a few of his own. His first work of self-published fiction – The Beast of Bear-tooth Mountain – became a #1 Best Seller in "Religious Fiction Short Stories" on Amazon in 2023. His Western short story, The Devil's Left Hand, received the Spur Award for "Best Western Short Fiction" from the Western Writers of America in 2025. Michael currently resides in North Idaho with his growing family.
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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
Kevin Costner as John Dutton posing with a horse in the first episode of Yellowstone.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
Two women smiling and waving in Landman.Image via Paramount+
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 Yellowstone or 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).
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Posts By Rahul Malhotra Sep 26, 2025Of course, there are certainly exceptions. Zoe Saldaña's Joe McNamara is fiercely intelligent, strategically proficient, and a capable warrior who doubles as a concerned mother. There are nuances and intricacies to her that simply don't exist in most of Sheridan's neo-Western content. Likewise, 1923 as a whole — despite following the exact same "greedy land developers attacking the Dutton Ranch in hopes of turning it into a resort for the rich" plot from Yellowstone — offers a more well-rounded and emotionally available look at the show's brand of cowboys and Indians than we ever got on the flagship series. Very much in the same footsteps as 1883, both 1923 and Lioness feel fresh by comparison due to the more self-contained nature of their stories, forcing Sheridan to come up with genuine beginnings and endings to character arcs rather than trying to aimlessly draw things out before ultimately failing to stick the landing.
Could Recycled Ideas Be Behind Taylor Sheridan's Fallout With Paramount?
John Dutton (Kevin Costner) sits at the head of the table beside his daughter Beth (Kelly Reilly) and sons, Kayce (Luke Grimes) and Jamie (Wes Bentley), on 'Yellowstone'Image via Paramount Network
Beth and Rip in 'Yellowstone' Season 5Image via Paramount Network
Billy Bob Thornton and Ali Larter in Landman Season 2 Episode 1Image via Paramount+
Jacob Lofland and Paulina Chavez in Landman Season 2 Episode 1Image via Paramount+
Taylor Sheridan as Cody Spears in a tanktop looking at someone to his right and talking to them in Lioness.Image via ParamountClose
With the news that Taylor Sheridan and Paramount are parting ways, we have to wonder why. Ever since Yellowstone was a ratings hit for the new Paramount Network, the studio gave Sheridan the full reins when it came to expanding both the Yellowstone Universe and his general television empire. It seemed as if new Sheridan content was coming out every few months, and his name was even attached to projects like Lawman: Bass Reeves, which he had very little to do with. While there are rumors that Sheridan's ideas for a 250th American anniversary series were "too political," leading to the split, there are other behind-the-scenes reasons too, namely Sheridan's struggle to play well with others, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Sheridan famously got rid of his entire Yellowstone writers' room after the second season. Still, we have to wonder if recycled ideas are part of the problem.
Because Sheridan works on so many of his projects by himself — Mayor of Kingstown and Tulsa King being the two exceptions to the general rule — it could be that Paramount had gotten sick of the filmmaker's voice. After all, with all the thematic crossover between his works, it's hard not to feel like Sheridan has gotten repetitive over the years. (We're sure that the cost of his shows probably was a factor as well.) But whether you love each new Taylor Sheridan drama or you wrote off his Paramount content years ago, his move to NBCUniversal is certainly an interesting development none of us saw coming. Perhaps over there, Sheridan will be able to flex his creative muscles a bit more and produce grand new stories that will have the whole world talking the way it once did with Yellowstone.
Yellowstone is available for streaming on Peacock, while the rest of Taylor Sheridan's television library is available on Paramount+.
Landman
TV-MA
Drama
5
10
Release Date
November 17, 2024
Genres
Drama
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