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In 2023, after Taylor Sheridan’s neo-Western megahit Yellowstone had become the most-watched scripted show on TV, an anonymous source accused its creator of having “developed a God complex.” Sheridan’s response was to embrace the dig: “If you want to call that a God complex, great,” he said of his working style in The Hollywood Reporter. Since then, he’s released Yellowstone’s direct successor (Dutton Ranch) and minted new hits (Landman and The Madison), signed a $1 billion deal with NBC Universal, built his own production facilities in Texas, snapped up tracts of ranchland across the West, and launched a host of lifestyle products that trade on his cinematic universe of big sky, hard men, harder women, and moral codes written in fence posts and barbed wire.
What Sheridan, now 56, has built isn’t an entertainment empire; it’s a personality-based brand ecosystem, a lifestyle proposition, a vertically integrated mythology of the American West that you can watch on Sunday night, wear, imbibe, and rub on your ranch-raised brisket. Call it Goop for F-150 owners; less face oil and moon dust, more whiskey and workwear. Call it the selling of a modern American frontier ethos and aesthetic, marketed and merchandised with the unapologetic, flood-the-zone fervor of Trump-era late-stage capitalism. God complex or not, Taylor Sheridan is a complex—a lifestyle-entertainment-industrial complex. And Americans are buying in, because it authentically feels both of the past and of the fraught present in our American experiment.
Sheridan first pitched his script for Yellowstone, originally written as a feature film, a dozen years ago, calling it “The Godfather in Montana.” Like Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece, which begins with the line “I believe in America,” Yellowstone and its subsequent prequels and spin-offs (1883, 1923, Marshals, and Dutton Ranch) tell the story of the American dream as one of haves and have-nots, centering on the kind of haves who own calves—lots and lots of them. “Yellowstone is basically a celebration of the empire builder,” says Richard Slotkin, the author of Gunfighter Nation and a scholar of the American frontier myth. “This is celebrating the big guy versus the little guy, other big guys, and every threat to his empire. What you have in [the character] John Dutton is a version of Elon Musk in a cowboy hat.”
If the Taylor-verse, as Sheridan’s sprawling constellation of TV series has come to be known, began with the story of an empire builder, it now represents the life’s work of one. “What Sheridan has successfully done is create a franchise out of a narrative,” says Matt Belloni, founding partner of insider news site Puck and host of the Hollywood podcast “The Town.” “I have never seen that before in the history of television.” Sheridan is the only major showrunner who writes nearly every episode of his series, and his shows are long-form advertisements for a way of life. In his cosmology, the West is a still-wild region where the headwaters of heroism, individualism, and Darwinism converge. “The further west you go, there is no rule of law,” he explained recently on the official Yellowstone podcast. “Incredibly beautiful things happen, and horrific things happen.”
In Sheridan’s telling, the West was won the hard way, through violence, corruption, and craven ambition. These themes percolate through the first three films he wrote (Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River), which he calls the Modern American Frontier trilogy. Those obsessions take various forms in the different demimondes—some not located in the actual West—he explores in his shows: Rust Belt prison towns (Mayor of Kingstown), covert spy units (Special Ops: Lioness), organized crime (Tulsa King), oil fields (Landman), and even the intimate world of a grieving, displaced family (The Madison).
His shows derive much of their authority and authenticity from the fact that Sheridan came honestly to these themes, which makes him an effective brand ambassador for the world he has created. His story is one part Horatio Alger, one part Horace Greeley’s “Go West, young man.” He learned to shoot and ride on his family’s ranch near Waco, Texas. After dropping out of college at Texas State University, he met a talent scout and decided to pursue acting. Sheridan struggled in Los Angeles, living out of his car for a time, and was down to his last $800 when he sold his first script. From there, he went on to write and then direct movies before returning to television with an epic in mind: Yellowstone. In part because he refused to compromise during development at HBO, the series was orphaned until finding a home at Paramount Network, the cable channel of last resort, which aired the first episode in June 2018. By 2022, Sheridan had put the renamed Paramount+ streaming service on the map and was rewarded with a $200 million contract.
Soon after, Sheridan bought the historic 260,000-acre Four Sixes, or 6666, a working cattle and quarter horse ranch near Guthrie, Texas, with a handful of investment partners, for $350 million. Between this parcel and Sheridan’s other ranches across Texas and Wyoming, he is now the 49th largest landowner in the United States. Those homesteader instincts and an aversion to shooting in Hollywood have prompted him—like Tyler Perry in Atlanta—to build his own self-contained studio in Fort Worth. Set on a development that comprises nearly one-eighth of the city, Sheridan’s SGS Studios is already the largest production facility in Texas, and more campuses are on the way. His productions use the studio grounds as locations (earning him accusations of self-dealing and double-dipping). As he prepares another Dutton spin-off about his Texas megaranch, Sheridan has turned Four Sixes into a brand name for a panoply of lifestyle products, including mail-order steaks and spice rubs; signature whiskey, vodka, and ranch water; apparel; and scented candles in fragrances such as Bunkhouse and Sexy in Suede. Conveniently, most Four Sixes items will fit in one of the hand-tooled Quanah Style tote bags that Sheridan sells for $1,960 each.
Mixing art and commerce hasn’t always gone down smoothly. Yellowstone fans were outraged by an episode during the show’s final season in which Beth Dutton orders a Tito’s vodka and soda, only to be informed by the barkeep that the establishment serves Four Sixes vodka. Yet Sheridan’s Four Sixes Ranch Steakhouse at the Wynn Hotel and Casino has become one of the most sought-after tables in Las Vegas since opening in 2024. “He chose to put an upscale steakhouse in the nicest hotel in Vegas—it is not cheap, and that’s a choice,” Belloni says. “He’s going after a version of the American West that is upscale and aspirational. That’s an important aspect of his brand.”
And while Sheridan’s neo-Western mythmaking might explore red-state values and culture, it has become a rare unifying force in a divided nation. Ask the liberal lions who’ve signed on to his shows, including Harrison Ford, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tom Hanks, and Samuel L. Jackson (who stars in the forthcoming Frisco King). Sheridan’s influence on the zeitgeist can be seen in everything from Steven Spielberg declaring his dream to make a Western to Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid wearing Stetsons for a cover story in Vogue.
The Sheridan effect divides actual ranchers in the Mountain West. Some of them appreciate the spotlight he’s shone on the challenges they face, but they’re wary that the attention it brings will hurt their way of life. It already has, according to Montana native Keegan Nashan, a community organizer and activist who has been raising the alarm about gentrification and gentri-vacations. “A lot of people are grateful for his vision—a nod to that preservation is lovely,” she says. “In the same breath, there’s the fetishization of the lifestyle. You’re allowed to cosplay, but when so many people play pretend, the folks who carried on the tradition of rodeo and ranching can’t afford to do so anymore. That’s heartbreaking.”
Maybe that’s the dark side of Sheridan’s Midas touch. The more successful he is at railing against the threats to ranch life in the West, the more he feeds those forces. It’s a conundrum one could imagine eating away at one of his characters. What might be bad in Taylor Sheridan’s book is good for the books of Taylor Sheridan Inc.