There are few writers around hotter right now than Taylor Sheridan. A former actor (he had a regular role on “Sons Of Anarchy,” Sheridan made his screenwriting debut with “Sicario” two years ago. It’s the kind of film that doesn’t really get made easily anymore — adult, complex drama — but it proved a surprise critical and commercial hit. Then Sheridan repeated the trick with “Hell Or High Water,” which unexpectedly became one of the biggest indie movies of last year and won multiple Oscar nods, including Best Picture and a Screenplay nod for the screenwriter.
Opinions are a little more divided over whether “Wind River,” which premiered at Sundance, stars Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen and which Sheridan directed, sees him pull off the trick for the third time (we liked it a lot), but there’s no doubt he’s a hot property, and as many hot properties are these days, Sheridan’s off to TV next.
Deadline reveal that the writer, with The Weinstein Company and John and Art Linson, has set up drama “Yellowstone” at Paramount Network. What’s Paramount Network, you might ask? Well, it’s going to be a rebranding of Spike, intended to be less dude-centric and more Peak TV-friendly, which will launch in early 2018 with a slate including the “Heathers” TV show and a “Waco” miniseries starring Michael Shannon.
Sheridan’s show is described as a “sweeping, cinematic” family drama about a family of ranchers near the National Park of the title, and how they navigate attempts to chip away at their large land by land developers, an Indian reservation, and the government. It sounds like another attempt to capture ‘Trump’s America’ by networks, but few have tapped into that sort of thing more presciently than Sheridan (who also developed a Greek Gods TV show called “Olympus” with Peter Berg long before “Sicario” was made), and we’re excited to see more.
Sheridan will also direct at least some of the project, and don’t look for it to be super bleak prestige stuff, either: “I don’t want it really to be super dark,” says Paramount’s Keith Cox. “There is so much really dark stuff on TV. What I like about Yellowstone is, it has dark moments and it actually has really humorous moments, and it’s very sexy but it’s also very violent too.” There’s no exact news on when it’ll debut, but it’ll be sometime in 2018, and we’ll be looking out for it.