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We’ll focus on the entertainment industry today, and a massive scoop from Matt Belloni and Puck that surfaced Sunday night:
For a couple months now, I’ve picked up chatter that Taylor Sheridan wasn’t happy with the new Paramount regime. TV’s top creator, the originator of Yellowstone and its successful spinoffs, and Landman, and Lioness, and a bunch more hit shows on Paramount+, was disappointed when most of the executives he worked with were either fired or marginalized after David Ellison bought the company in August. Some of Sheridan’s budgets have been questioned by incoming streaming chief Cindy Holland, according to sources.
Now comes the big news: Sheridan has decided to leave Paramount when his film and TV commitments are up. He just closed a massive deal with rival NBCUniversal. The nearly eight-year arrangement for film will begin in March. But it’s the five-year TV overall deal that is most lucrative, unique, and potentially game-changing in the streaming business. Sheridan’s current Paramount pact for TV services runs through 2028, after which he will begin writing and producing shows exclusively for Universal platforms, including Peacock and NBC.
The Wall Street Journal followed on that news with more details, reporting that the five-year TV deal for Sheridan “could be worth as much as $1 billion, depending on the success of Sheridan’s projects.” Sheridan will be free to make movies for NBC Universal beginning next year; he’ll have to wait until 2029 before making any TV shows for Peacock and NBC. For Paramount+ and its new benefactor David Ellison, losing the most valuable creator in show business is a real setback to at least the optics of the revival that Ellison’s undertaken this year.
Beyond the intrigue of how that relationship broke bad and what that portends for Paramount, there’s also a more fundamental story: Taylor Sheridan, who’s never won an Emmy award for his TV work, is leaving a Paramount deal that reportedly paid him $200 million for an NBC deal that will double that salary, and could pay him as much as $1 billion. Many of you may be wondering: Who is this person? How did we get here?
As a fan of Sheridan’s work, I’d like to take this opportunity to provide answers. Sheridan’s rise is one of the craziest things to happen in Hollywood this century, and while we only briefly hit this story on Sharp Tech this week, I think his billion dollar market value is a tech story in one respect that’s obvious, and one that’s less so. But first, some backstory.
What Taylor Sheridan Brought to Paramount
Sheridan’s story has become a myth unto itself over the past 15 years in Hollywood. James Hibberd at the Hollywood Reporter did a excellent job taking a comprehensive look at his rise in 2023, and last year Trung Phan built on that work with a fun profile of his own. In brief: Sheridan began his career as an actor and found limited success on the margins of Hollywood as a regular on Veronica Mars and Sons of Anarchy. That trajectory hit a point of diminishing returns as he turned 40, and a contract dispute with Sons of Anarchy led him to quit acting altogether. As Sheridan recalled an FX executive telling his agent, “He probably deserves to make more, but we’re not going to pay him more because — guess what — he’s not worth more. That’s what he’s worth. There’s 50 of him. He is 11 on the call sheet. That’s what [Sheridan] is, and that’s all he’s ever going to be.”
So he became a writer. With a baby on the way, his wife maxed out her credit card to purchase Final Draft software, and in 2013 Sheridan sold the screenplay for Sicario, which would ultimately be released in 2015 and become one of the best movies of the decade. The following year, Sheridan was nominated for an academy award for his writing on Hell or High Water (2016), and he was officially a successful screenwriter. Then came TV, as he sold the development rights for Yellowstone to HBO; he got buy-in from then-programming president Michael Lombardo before the show was sidetracked in development hell over concerns about casting and the fit with HBO’s brand. Ultimately, when Lombardo left HBO, he gave Sheridan his script back to market (typically, when HBO purchases the right to develop a show they also retain rights to kill it if the show never makes it to air). Sheridan sold Yellowstone to Paramount shortly thereafter, and a few years later, it was the most popular cable TV show in America.
In the midst of that success—and this is where the legend becomes almost a cartoon—Sheridan was offered the chance to buy a $350 million ranch in North Texas. Having grown up in the area, where the 266,000 acre 6666 ranch is legendary, the opportunity was a dream come true.
Paramount had been selling Sheridan on an exclusive production deal in the wake of the Yellowstone success, and while Sheridan had been on the fence about working with one company, the chance to purchase one of the largest ranches in America—the same family-owned ranch that loomed over his childhood and served as inspiration for the Dutton family ranch in Yellowstone—made his decision easier. So, to finance the purchase of his new ranch, he agreed to the aforementioned $200 million deal with Paramount, which was launching a streaming service in 2021 and hoping to build it around a variety of Sheridan projects, including multiple Yellowstone spinoffs.
Those spinoffs (1883, 1923) became hits in their own right, as did the other Sheridan shows produced as part of the deal (Tulsa King, Landman, Special Ops: Lioness, Lawmen: Bass Reeves, Mayor of Kingstown). It gave Paramount a steady stream of tentpole programming that acquired and retained customers for their fledgling streaming service, while Sheridan had complete creative control and liberal budgets to bring all these stories to life. Line items on those budgets included filming on the 6666 ranch that Sheridan now owns ($50,000 a week) and renting 6666 horses and cows to feature in his shows ($25 per cow), and yes, some of that spending was controversial. But in broad strokes, the deal with Paramount was a mutually beneficial arrangement that was working remarkably well.
Then Ellison took over and new, Ellison-appointed executives began asking questions about budgets and intruding on Sheridan’s zen, and he began to look elsewhere. According to the Journal’s reporting, after talks with NBC intensified, “Donna Langley, chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment, made a pilgrimage to his ranch to help seal the deal.” I’m glad the ranch could remain central to the story.
What Tech Did to Modern TV
Understanding what makes Sheridan’s work valuable in the entertainment marketplace first requires an accounting of how that market has changed of late. 15 years ago, when Sheridan was still acting, the biggest studios and networks in America saw the threat of Netflix encroaching on their audience, and eventually, one by one, they decided that streaming was the future of television. Rather than working to protect the cable bundle and the linear TV model, these studios built streaming platforms to compete in Netflix’s world, put their best content on those platforms, sold subscriptions far below cost to encourage customers to sign up, and accelerated the erosion of the cable model that had worked quite well for about 40 years. NBCUniversal is a subsidiary of Comcast, quite literally a cable company, but their playbook was no different than anyone else’s, and NBC launched Peacock in August of 2020.
Peacock has been hemorrhaging money ever since. Like every other company that’s tried to compete with Netflix, NBC has found that acquiring Peacock customers has proven to be harder than expected, and retaining those customers with compelling content month after month is equally vexing. In that context, rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to generate hits internally, it’s a reasonable bet that NBC will fare better spending hundreds of millions of dollars externalizing that challenge to a creator who’s demonstrated an ability to consistently attract an audience and generates enough of that content to keep that audience subscribed.
The breadth of Sheridan’s success really is mind boggling. What differentiates him from his prestige TV peers is not merely a lack of awards, but an ability to churn out high-quality programming at an astonishing pace. Consider that Apple had a big, Emmy-nominated hit with Severance in 2022, and the 10-episode second season of that show didn’t air until 2025. During that same period, from April 2022 to January 2025, Sheridan released 1) the final season of Yellowstone; 2) two seasons Mayor of Kingstown; 3) two seasons of Special Ops: Lioness; 4) two seasons of Tulsa King; 4) one season of Lawmen: Bass Reeves; and 5) two seasons of 1923. That’s a total of 93 episodes of television across six shows, over two-and-a-half years. All of those shows have a healthy audience, too, and while Apple is cagey about releasing any viewership numbers for its shows, it’s a safe bet that each Sheridan property has a bigger audience than Severance. Even Lawmen: Bass Reeves, a show I never watched and had frankly forgotten about, set records when it was released.
But the quantity of successful Sheridan shows is only half the story. The quality of Sheridan’s work, and why these shows tend to resonate, is more interesting to me. That’s a tech story, too, albeit one that’s rooted in more subjective analysis.
The rise of streaming meant that in addition to their attempts to replicate the success of Netflix, every major studio in Hollywood was also trying to become HBO, generating hit original programming, usually 10-episode dramas, that would justify premium subscription prices. This led to wild spending sprees, big swings, a handful of big wins, and lots of forgettable content (most of which I’ve watched). The shifting priorities of Hollywood and resulting glut of bingeable shows has been well documented, but what’s less commonly accounted for is that this shift in programming priorities coincided with the rise of Twitter.
And Twitter was bad for art. It was a place where media members would exchange takes and share their work and attempt to advance their careers, and this dynamic created echo chambers and groupthink in all kinds of areas, including television criticism. And because the success or failure of streaming shows often turned on critical reception amplifying a show’s signal in this crowded entertainment environment, the dynamics above often led to strange creative choices. For one, there was the phenomenon of self-serious, “good” TV shows that felt like they were written more for 25 year-old critics than the audience. Canonical examples would be HBO’s Barry or FX’s The Bear, of which Slate finally remarked in a gratifying takedown, “what’s so irksome about The Bear isn’t just its aimlessness. It’s the sleight of hand that tries to keep you from noticing said aimlessness.” There was also an uptick in didactic art that would distractingly launder progressive politics into stories at the expense of authenticity. For example, here’s a positive review of HBO’s The Pitt, which won “Best Drama series” at the Emmy’s this year:
The Pitt tackles nearly every political issue of the moment—COVID-19, racism, transphobia, sex trafficking, abortion, fatphobia, homelessness, white male rage, childhood sexual abuse, addiction, mass shootings, vaccine skepticism, the carceral state, the encroaching threat of (and spurious justification for) private equity’s takeover of underfunded public health infrastructure. In its checklist-style, homiletic approach to teachable moments, the show can feel almost parodic. One exchange, between Dr. Collins (Tracy Ifeachor) and Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif), verges on the kind of dialogue you might expect from a corporate training video.
Not all these shows are bad, but they can be frustrating in similar ways. And at a broader level, what we’ve seen is that the increased demand for high-end original programming coincided with a sort of creative convergence, all of which gave birth to a landscape characterized by familiar aesthetics, predictable lessons, and too much risk aversion to reckon with the complexity of the real world. It reminds me of a wonderfully cranky column from Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times over the summer, in which he labels the Prestige TV era “bullshit on stilts” and observes, “So little of this stuff ever sticks. It is beautifully lit ephemera, but it permeates everything.”
Enter Sheridan. As so much of TV began to feel the same, that created a lane for someone to emerge as unique and refreshing even as he executes a playbook that’s actually fairly traditional.
What Makes Sheridan Shows Different
I’ll speak for myself here. I mentioned at the beginning that I’m a Sheridan fan, and a friend this week called his shows “slop,” which led to me offering a surprisingly passionate defense of his work. And on one hand, sure. He’s made about 400 hours of television in five years; so many shows that I haven’t had time to watch all of them (apologies to Tulsa King, Bass Reeves and seasons 2 and 3 of Mayor of Kingstown). By any objective standard, Sheridan’s making middlebrow fare that takes conventional TV formulas and dramatic tensions (often old-fashioned protagonists chafing against modernity, occasionally unsanctioned black ops assassination missions in Lioness) and builds stories around characters and settings that are new to TV, with propulsive plots that keep people watching. There is also romance baked into each show, and all the characters are very attractive. For people who just want to watch a good TV drama without thinking too hard, Sheridan scratches that itch.
But as someone who does think too hard, I think it would be a mistake to understand much of Sheridan’s work as Suits-on-a-ranch. He works with familiar formulas, but his shows are also full of raggedy plot threads that aren’t always resolved (what was Demi Moore’s character doing in Landman?), and weird digressions that don’t always pay off (Ali Larter taking senior citizens trip to the strip club in Landman). What feels especially distinct, to me, is a creator that doesn’t have any fear of trying something that doesn’t land. Or to put it differently: Taylor Sheridan is quite clearly not on Twitter.
Alongside a generation of self-conscious creatives addled on 24 hour news and endless feedback loops among critics and peers, his work is both gripping and full of laughably bizarre choices (why was there a teen pregnancy subplot in Special Ops: Lioness?), settings that never appear in mainstream media (ranches in Montana, oil patches in Midland and Odessa, a prison in Detroit), and characters whose worldviews either sharply diverge from those of the New York Times opinion section, or, in some cases, are broadly written parodies of that same opinion section. And all of this is refreshing! It’s not weighed down by the conventions and neuroses of the modern era, and therefore it’s more creatively interesting than almost everything being pushed on every other streamer.
Sheridan’s work is often described and derided as “right-coded,” but that’s mostly a descriptor applied by people who don’t watch any of these shows. Yes, as the Journal notes, “Sheridan’s shows about tough men contending with a changing world appeal to red-state audiences,” but they appeal to plenty of liberals just the same. In addition to hard boiled male leads and right-leaning characters who aren’t explicitly criticized as bad, Sheridan’s show about unsanctioned black ops assassination missions is fronted by two women (Nicole Kidman and Zoe Saldana) and depicts those missions with real moral ambiguity, while 1923 foregrounds a story about the abuse indigenous people suffered on the American frontier. Finally, not that this should count for anything in this stupid game of scorekeeping, but Sheridan has also faced criticism from fans on the right for Yellowstone plots that are “too woke.”
What Sheridan is most dedicated to is writing characters that audiences aren’t seeing elsewhere—ranchers, oil men, special ops soldiers, frontier settlers and indigenous people from a hundred years ago—and treating them with dignity as he tells fun, dramatic stories. These are the qualities have made him the most successful creative in Hollywood, even as he writes from Texas, on one of the biggest cattle ranches in the world. If there’s a political valence to anything he’s doing, it’s evident in an absence of neuroticism in the way he writes and the volume of material he generates, and an earnestness in the stories he’s trying to tell. Sheridan feels an obligation to entertain in all his shows, he attempts to depict the world as it exists, and when it comes to the love stories and heartbreak in his work, he’s not afraid to get sentimental.
In the Hollywood Reporter story from 2023, Sheridan recalled the lunch at which he and Yellowstone co-creator, John Linson, found out that HBO was passing on the show. “It just feels so Middle America,” an executive told them. “We’re HBO, we’re avant-garde, we’re trendsetters. This feels like a step backward.” As it turns out, though, going backward can be pretty lucrative.
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