The True Story Behind Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone

Taylor Sheridan’s and John Linson’s “Yellowstone” premiered on Paramount+ in 2018 and has proven to be one of the network’s biggest hits. To day, the show has run 47 episodes over five seasons and spawned the spinoffs “1883” and “1923.” Starring Kevin Costner, “Yellowstone” takes place on the Dutton family ranch in modern-day Montana. The ranch borders Yellowstone National Park, hence the name, while the actual series follows the soap-opera-like drama of the Duttons as well as characters on the neighboring Broken Rock Indian Reservation. Such a reservation is fictional, but the series is accurate in depicting Crow people living there.

Sheridan, who grew up on ranches, pitched “Yellowstone” as a “Godfather”-like family epic, complete with crime and corruption. The characters all resort to increasingly dark actions to make the ranch successful. Because “Yellowstone” was such a hit, Sheridan was able to purchase 270,000 acres (!) of Texas land, and one would be tempted to see a delicious parallel. Just like Costner’s character on the show, its creator has become an ambitious rancher struggling to survive. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in 2023, Sheridan mused that it’s easier in real life and he hasn’t had to kill anyone.

“Yellowstone,” Sheridan also noted, while wholly fictional, is dealing with a very real and very distressing concern in Montana. Ranching, he has observed, is waning as an occupation, as gentrification is becoming an ever-expanding problem, even in the remote, rural frontier. A lot of “Yellowstone” is devoted to the fineries of resource management and the role of money out on the frontier, particularly how a shortage might be even more deeply felt than in anywhere else in the world. Sheridan also spoke to the Los Angeles Times in 2018 about how “Yellowstone” is a direct reflection of that reality.

Sheridan, as mentioned, has been a frontier denizen since boyhood. It’s no wonder that his films and TV shows tend to be frontier-inflected. Sheridan wrote the screenplays for the lauded films “Sicario,” “Hell or High Water,” and “Wind River” (which he also directed). He also helmed the survival thriller “Those Who Wish Me Dead” in 2021 and created the hit shows “Tulsa King,” “Mayor of Kingstown,” and “Special Ops: Lioness.” His projects are dusty, masculine, rough-hewn, and old-fashioned.

Sheridan has resisted the commercial crassness offered by encroaching modernity, seeing “Yellowstone” as an up-to-date portrait of America’s rural deterioration. Corporations are destroying workmen and cutting into already-low profits. As Sheridan put it: 

“These issues of land development, resource mismanagement, oppression, and extreme poverty and inequity in government — they exist here. […] But when it happens in a small area, in a rural area […] and because there’s fewer people, the consequences seem much more acute. When you start seeing Costcos in a landscape of farms and ranches, it’s much more dramatic than if they jam one in the San Fernando Valley.”

Famously, Sheridan pitched “Yellowstone” to HBO, but it turned down the series as being too backward facing. HBO wanted to be known for being forward, fresh, and cutting-edge, and a modern Western just wasn’t where it was at for the network. Its executives also said that they could only greenlight the series if Sheridan could convince Robert Redford to star. Sheridan went to Sundance, managed to secure an audience with Redford, and actually convinced him to appear in “Yellowstone.” HBO’s execs were shocked, stating they’d just wanted a “Robert Redford type.” It’s possible they couldn’t afford Redford.

The fates eventually found the project at Paramount Network and it’s been going along swimmingly ever since. The second half of the show’s fifth season is scheduled to begin airing on November 10, 2024. Other spinoffs are also in the works.