It’s not often that a TV show not only nails the zeitgeist but anticipates it—that zeitgeist being the election of Donald Trump and concomitant rebuke of the Democratic political-cultural agenda. Make that TV shows, plural, all from the ridiculously prolific keyboard of Taylor Sheridan. His massive hit Yellowstone spawned two prequels—1883 and 1923—and five more series: Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Lawmen: Bass Reeves,  Lioness, and, most recently, Landman. He did all of this in six years, after writing an Oscar-nominated script for a Texas bank-robber movie called Hell or High Water in 2016. If Sheridan told his patron studio, Paramount, that he wanted to do a show about paint drying, they’d find a way to air it. And back up a Brink’s truck to his Texas ranch for the privilege.

Such is the 54-year-old writer-director-producer’s Midas touch with “flyover country”—as New York and Hollywood have long dismissed their red-state viewership. Even more remarkable is how this unfettered clout is manifesting itself in his writing. He offered confusingly mixed political messages in the first couple of years of Yellowstone—though not so mixed that its audience didn’t immediately understand what he was trying to say and make the show the biggest hit on television, despite airing on the Paramount Network, which you had to search high and low for in your cable package. Now his mix of cultural conservatism, libertarian/Jeffersonian objection to federal overreach, and muscular foreign policy is fully out of the closet. Consider two typical Sheridan monologues.

The first is from Landman, a soapy-actiony drama that premiered in November 2024 and that’s set against the fracking-fueled West Texas oil boom. Billy Bob Thornton plays Tommy Norris, a roughneck fixer “landman” for a fictional wildcatting outfit called M-Tex. The company’s snarky young lawyer is surprised when Tommy tells her they use wind farms—what she calls “clean energy”—to power pumps so remote that they’re off the grid. He claps back, “They use alternative energy. There’s nothing clean about this.” She throws him a Zillennial eye roll: “Please, Mr. Oilman, tell me how wind is bad for the environment.” So he does—with impassioned, profane eloquence—as they stand under a towering 400-foot wind turbine that stands on a concrete pad that covers a third of an acre and sits 12 feet deep.

“Do you have any idea how much diesel they have to burn to mix that much concrete?” Tommy schools her. “Or make that steel? And haul this s—t out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You wanna take a guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that f—n’ thing? Or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of makin’ it. And don’t get me started on solar panels or the lithium in your Tesla battery. And never mind the fact that if the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow, we don’t have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities. It’d take 30 years if we started tomorrow.”

He isn’t done: “And unfortunately for your grandkids, we have a 120-year-old petroleum-based infrastructure. Our whole lives depend on it. Hell, it’s in everything. That road we came in on. The wheels on every car ever made, including yours. It’s in ten-nis rackets and lipstick and refrigerators and antihistamines. Pretty much anything plastic. Your cellphone case, artificial heart valves, any kinda clothin’ that’s not made of animal or plant fibers. Soap, f—n’ hand lotion, garbage bags, fishin’ boats—you name it. Every f—n’ thang. And you know what the kicker is? We’re gonna run out of it before we find its replacement…. Getting oil outta the ground is the most dangerous job in the world. We don’t do it because we like it. We do it ’cuz we run outta options…. There ain’t nobody to blame but the demand that we keep pumpin’ it.”

The clip went viral (Ted Cruz reposted it on X), so vivid is it as an indictment of the hypocrisies of “green” energy. The kicker is the lawyer’s sudden terror at the sight of a rattlesnake at her feet. Tommy advises her to get the hell away from it, but she freezes. He has to fetch a shovel from his pickup and cut the rattler’s head off before this damn fool city girl gets herself bit. An act of rugged chivalry that bookends their meet-cute in a bar the day before, when he asks the bartender to get a club soda for “the lady” and she language-polices him:

“I’d prefer if you didn’t refer to me as ‘the lady.’”

Tommy feigns surprise: “Oh, did I guess wrong? I’m so sorry, sir. And hats off to the plastic surgeon that shaved that Adam’s apple.”

You could call this sexist or transphobic or whatever, and plenty of reviewers have, but sexism is a tricky xcharge to level against Sheridan. The women in his fictional universe may be alluring objects of the male gaze, but these pant-suited hard-asses are seldom the weaker sex. Kelly Reilly’s Beth Dutton in Yellowstone throws as mean a punch as any male Montanan, especially since Kevin Costner’s John Dutton exited the series. Helen Mirren as Cara Dutton in 1923 is as flinty and unflappable as her husband, Jacob (an ur-flinty Harrison Ford). And Lioness is built around a CIA program that trains and deploys ruthless female “operators.” It stars Zoë Saldaña as Joe McNamara, who can out-alpha any of her team’s hulking “gray men” (ex–Special Forces contractors) and thinks nothing of ripping them a new one if they get out of line. Oh, and that smug lawyer who got scared by the snake? She’s as lethal as any diamondback when it comes to defending Tommy in a liability lawsuit. “You think I got this job because I’m pretty?” she sneers, after absolutely demolishing her male opponents in a deposition.

Is that sexist? Or, to paraphrase Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap, is it sexy?

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The second season of Lioness also has Sheridan flying his freak flag, which is basically a big ol’ Stars and Stripes. China is the “big bad,” having contracted a Mexican drug cartel to carry out a provocative geopolitical gambit, kidnapping a congresswoman (and murdering her family) to force us to retaliate on Mexican soil, robbing us of moral high ground vis-à-vis Taiwan. As the show’s deputy CIA director explains to the secretary of state:

“China is Mexico’s No. 1 trade partner in crude oil natural gases as well as gold. So any military response to this on Mexican soil renders our opposition to a move into Taiwan as hypocritical to both NATO and the UN. And with Russia chairing the Security Council, China has free rein for a Taiwanese invasion with little or no consequences.”

The secretary of state, by the way, is Morgan Freeman. Nicole Kidman is also in the Situation Room. Sheridan’s casts are an embarrassment of A-listers (Jon Hamm and Demi Moore are supporting players in Landman). Proof that his critics may not understand on what side their bread is buttered but the actors, or their handlers, certainly do.

The war games in Lioness have the whiff of Deep State paranoia, as if all the world’s affairs are decided by five people in a badly lit room. As do the scenes with Kidman (who plays Zoë Saldaña’s CIA boss) and her husband, a master-of-the-universe money man who issues cryptic, portentous advice at the breakfast table. “Take a look at Mexican exports,” he mumbles from behind his laptop. “Particularly oil.”

Give Sheridan credit for breaking down sophisticated concepts, even boring ones, and giving them dramatic urgency. In the opening scene of Landman, Tommy explains the difference between surface and mineral rights. Yawn, you may think. But no, because he does it with a burlap bag on his head while cartel enforcers beat the crap out of him. Spoiler alert: Tommy wins the argument. He’s seen worse. His ex-wife—a blonde bombshell timed to blow up every time she shows up in his life—is more dangerous than any sicario.

Another hot take is what Sheridan sees as the woke degradation of the American military: “The Army does sensitivity training now. When I served, there was none of that sh-t. There was no bathroom of the gender you decide you are today or any of that bulls—t…. Women and fags and f—ing ladyboys and dykes. That’s our Army now.”

Sounds like something out of Pete Hegseth’s book The War on Warriors. But what makes this speech so unexpected is that Sheridan puts it in the mouth of a Mexican-American money launderer. The money launderer’s daughter, a member of the Lioness squad, has been tasked with turning her father on his cartel-boss brother. Her cover is a fake dishonorable discharge from the Army, news that precipitates his rant. Which it turns out is just a warm-up for a peroration on the decline and fall of the American empire. Like Tommy’s soliloquy in Landman, it bears quoting in full:

“The first sign an empire is failing is when its people question the institutions the empire was built on. The structure of government, the churches, the schools. They reject God because the emperors believe they are God. And the people become so rich, everyone believes they are an emperor as well. And too good to do the jobs that built the empire in the first place. So they outsource those jobs. And they open their borders to allow people desperate to do all the other jobs the other people are too rich to do. Then comes the guilt for all this wealth. But still the empire thrives. And now everyone questions their wealth. Then they question themselves. And then they reject everything that built the empire to begin with. They destroy their own symbols, attack themselves like a cancer, attack the people who protect the empire, attack you for protecting it. Then the wolves come. And all the people who lived like emperors will know the suffering they blamed themselves for creating. And they will be slaughtered. And a new empire will rise from its ashes. Then the cycle begins again.”

Agree with Sheridan’s doomsday prognostication or not, it’s a pretty articulate summary of similar warnings offered by Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Douglas Murray about the West’s complacency in the face of Islamic fundamentalism. But again, Sheridan doesn’t rely on his actor Demián Castro’s charisma to carry the day. The tension underneath the scene comes from the fact that this criminal holding forth in his Dallas mansion doesn’t know his daughter is there to make him a stooge of the CIA. And she doesn’t know if she’s up to the task of turning her beloved father. One of Sheridan’s gifts—and they are manifold—is his ability to get out his worldview through unlikely messengers caught in undeniably compelling circumstances.

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What is that worldview? Well, it sure ain’t woke. In the new season of Yellowstone, one cowpoke calls another one an idiot. A linguistic colloquy ensues:

“Can you still say idiot?”

“You can say idiot. You can’t say retard.”

“Ain’t they the same thing?”

“A retard’s got a disability. An idiot’s just f—in’ stupid.”

Low-hanging fruit maybe, but Sheridan is happy to have his stand-ins pick it. Just like when Beth Dutton sticks it to her late father’s environmental-activist lover:

“What do you think the woman with the mink coat does when you throw paint on her mink coat? She buys another mink coat, you entitled dips—t.”

Morgan Freeman gives legacy media the Sheridan treatment in Lioness:

“The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal—they stopped reporting the news and started telling us what they think the news is and what our opinion of that news should be. Americans have always been gullible, but they’re not stupid. Lie to them enough and they won’t trust you to tell them the sun’s rising.” He then delivers a wistful recollection of what a great president George W. Bush was right after 9/11. And he’s supposed to be a Democrat.

Another target never out of Sheridan’s gunsights are big cities. In Wind River, an excellent 2018 movie he wrote and directed about a murder on an Indian reservation, a couple of doomed lovebirds muse about places they might go to escape the rez. New York? No way. Los Angeles? Worse: “I’d rather be back in Iraq.”

Right up there with those coastal Sodom and Gomorrahs—urban decay well documented in the less political crime drama Mayor of Kingstown—is the U.S. government. In Landman, Tommy has to explain to his lawyer interlocutor why he doesn’t report company trucks stolen by the cartels to transport drugs across the border. It’s because three weeks later the cartels give them back. But if he reported the thefts, the trucks would be impounded until a trial and in two years maybe he’d get them back. Meantime, he’d have to buy more trucks. Then they’d get stolen.

“The Wild West,” the credulous lawyer marvels.

Tommy doesn’t miss a beat: “You bet your ass.”

In Yellowstone, the Feds are regarded with the same level of distrust and disdain as carpetbagging real estate developers and banks. Beth Dutton is trying to save the ranch from both corporate and Washington-based predators. The local tribal chairman drops some aphoristic Native American wisdom on her about the Department of the Interior: “It is a snake that speaks from its tail so it may save its mouth for striking.”

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When he’s not on the attack, Sheridan defends his all-American shibboleths: land ownership (especially by its original inhabitants, Native Americans), guns, family. Marlboro Man that he is, he even makes a case for cigarettes. Above all, he extols an honest day’s work. Whether it’s herding cattle or “tripping pipe” on an oil rig or fixing up an old cabin in a montage set to country music that could double as a Home Depot ad. Roofing, belt-sanding—he lovingly depicts jobs ordinary Americans know how to do and coastal elites pay undocumented immigrants to take care of. For Sheridan, DIY isn’t just how you put together a coffee table from Ikea, it’s a way of life.

In Yellowstone, a Texas state trooper pulls Beth Dutton over for speeding, then lets her off when she hears her husband is working at the legendary 6666 ranch (which Sheridan used his TV treasure to buy in 2022, and he’s setting yet another spin-off there). 

“This is cattle country, ma’am,” the trooper explains. “We know what it takes to put a steak on the plate around here.”

Then of course there’s rugged individualism. That’s Sylvester Stallone’s mobster cast out of New Jersey to make it on his own in Oklahoma in Tulsa King (the least political of Sheridan’s shows). And it’s the tribal police chief in Wind River warning a fish-out-of-water FBI agent who wants to call for backup, “This isn’t the land of backup…. This is the land of you’re on your own.” Sheridan himself eschews backup. Not only does he produce all these shows, but he also writes most of them himself and acts in them. (He made his living as a character actor before writing his first script at 40.) Usually he’ll show up as a laconic cowboy wisecracking from on top of a horse, but in Lioness he does a turn as an “old soldier” on the CIA’s off-the-books payroll. We meet his character shirtless, and he is jacked.

With eight shows on the air and plenty more to come, he’s flexing his political muscles just as hard. Critics may write him off as a MAGA propagandist, a redneck-panderer, or a Trump apologist. But odds are, many of those opinions will not be contaminated by the actual watching of his shows. Because if you do, it’s very difficult to argue they aren’t as well-written and well-acted as anything on TV.

Morgan Freeman is right. Americans aren’t stupid. They vote with their remote. Even in the swing states.

Photo: Michael Buckner/Deadline/Penske Media via Getty Images

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