The co-creator of the neo-Western television drama Yellowstone has taken aim at critics in an expletive-filled interview.
Taylor Sheridan, appearing on The Bill Simmons Podcast on Monday, admitted that he’s not seeking to curry favor with critics when putting together storylines for Yellowstone or its spin-offs.
The 56-year-old cited how, in the Paramount+ show Landman, he kept Demi Moore, 63, largely in the background for the first season, which he figured they would dislike.
“The critics are going to come after me: ‘I’m underutilizing [Moore], can’t write for women’—all this nonsense. Then I’m going to kill your husband and you’re going to have to run the oil company,” he said, according to Deadline, referencing a plot line.
“The critics and me… I don’t care what they think and it annoys the s--t out of them that I don’t care. I’ll be the first to tell you that there are things that I do that rage-bait them a bit, and this is one of them. F--- ‘em, honestly.”
![“I knew when I started writing [I wanted] to simply not do what everyone else was doing," Sheridan said on Bill Simmons' podcast.](https://www.thedailybeast.com/resizer/v2/M7A3SZUJBRFHPLMACWUQVHZRPM.jpg?auth=ae019aa54ace917a0cb8d6cb412e4896713780832cbba24d7ac9c1f95157e045&width=800&height=999)
Sheridan moved on from Paramount and is now under contract with NBC Universal. According to The Wall Street Journal, he left after declining to make his shows “overtly political.”
Speaking to Simmons, Sheridan also criticized studio and network executives for making “endless rewrites” rather than giving writers and directors more autonomy.
“It didn’t used to be this way when Steve McQueen was a movie star at Paramount and Bobby Evans ran the studio because writers were turned loose. Directors were turned completely loose. There weren’t endless rewrites. There weren’t meetings with executives about tone and mood and all this nonsense. You didn’t have a lot of people. By the way, the studio executives and the network executives… these are marketing executives for the most part,” he said.
“Or maybe they studied law or whatever,” Sheridan continued. “Then they came and they got a job in the mailroom at CAA or WME and hated that s--t. So, then they ended up as an intern at some network. Then through attrition, they find themselves the head of development. Well, what do you know about developing story? You know nothing. So they get terrified, panicked that the audience won’t get it because they actually have no storytellers.”
Sheridan said that when he transitioned last decade from acting to writing, he wanted to “simply not do what everyone else was doing.”
He explained: “What everyone else was doing was taking shortcuts, essentially breaking all the very basic fundamental rules of storytelling, because they couldn’t figure out their story.”
“With a movie, you’re supposed to show me what’s happening. The camera is supposed to move the story. The dialogue is supposed to tell me how the people in this world feel about what’s happening or what they hope to do or what they wish they hadn’t done or had done,” he said.
Sheridan also singled out Marvel for failing to properly advance the plots of its movies.
Their characters, he said, share “information dumps that you have to follow to get to the action rather than actually moving plot with action.“
