Get the latest gossip
Taylor Sheridan, American Conqueror
Without its central performance, Yellowstone’s final season drove off a cliff. But the television empire it spawned has never been stronger.
Landman, roughly a Friday Night Lights –style drama, is propelled by the rhythms of watching charismatic leading man Tommy Norris, played by Billy Bob Thornton, bumping around West Texas in his pickup truck and solving problems. This consumer value proposition is further bolstered by the consistency of the Taylor Sheridan experience, for which there is a discernible formula: Take a setting you don’t typically see rendered with much specificity elsewhere on television, layer onto it a patina of a political idea, populate it with characters who talk and cuss in the same way, and then adjust the whole mix to fit the mold of different genres. He has a background of writing politically twinged thrillers ( Sicario, Hell or High Water, Wind River, all unambiguously good movies) that share fairly vague yet provocative values: a belief in the law being incompatible with actual justice, an interest in the symbolism of land and spaces beyond major urban cities, and general skepticism of the state and its bureaucracy.
Or read this on VULTURE
