Taylor Sheridan is the first to admit that the number of shows he’s committed to various Paramount platforms is “exaggerated.”
“This volume of work is not sustainable in the long term,” says the “Yellowstone” co-creator. “But it’s an opportunity to tell stories the way I want to tell them, with a creative freedom that just doesn’t exist in this field.” And so I kind of have to take advantage of that… I don’t really want to do that when I’m 70. I don’t know that I want to do this when I’m 60. So I’d rather work really hard to do it now.”
Sheridan has nine shows on the air or in the works, including a project marking Sylvester Stallone’s first series regular role.
* “Yellow Stone” — The mothership that started it all in 2018.
*“1883” — “Yellowstone” prequel about the origins of the Dutton family.
*“1932” – A sequel to “1883” in which the Duttons endure Prohibition and the Great Depression.
*“6666” – A recent “Yellowstone” spinoff set on the titular ranch.
* “Mayor of Kingstown” – A non-Yellowstone drama starring Jeremy Renner as the head of a powerful family in a town kept afloat by the local jail.
*”Tulsa King” – A mob drama starring Sylvester Stallone as a lifelong mobster exiled to Oklahoma.
*“Lioness” — A spy thriller starring Zoe Saldaña and executive produced by Nicole Kidman about women trained to infiltrate terrorist and criminal networks.
* “Bass Reeves” – David Oyelowo stars in the true story of the first black US Marshal to work west of the Mississippi.
* “countryman” – A contemporary story revolving around Billy Bob Thornton as a crisis manager for an oil company in west Texas.
Tulsa King’s backstory underscores Sheridan’s appeal in the creative community. The process of coming up with the idea for the show, writing the pilot script, and getting Stallone on board took about a week, Sheridan says.
“I spoke to a producer and it’s COVID,” he says. “Everybody goes crazy in some way. He asked me for ideas. I said, ‘Look, I think all you need to do to have an interesting TV show is take a really fascinating character and throw him into a world we know nothing about.'”
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From there, Sheridan dreamed up the character of Dwight “The General” Manfredi. Due to the pandemic, Sheridan had ample time to write the script.
“I call [the producer] two days later and said, ‘Hey, I wrote what we talked about.’”
Sheridan then called Stallone directly to talk about the show. The actor was based in Florida and also got a little crazy in the early days of lockdown. A day after Sheridan sent him the script, Stallone was back on the phone. “‘I love it. When are we shooting it?'” Sheridan says the “Rocky” legend told him. Days later, the pair sold the show to Paramount.
Similarly, with the spec script in hand, Sheridan approached Saldaña and Kidman directly about participating in Lioness. (The idea for the show, based on a real-life CIA initiative, came to Sheridan from actor-producer Jill Wagner.)
“I don’t think anyone can speak to my projects better than I can,” Sheridan says of his habit of calling A-list stars directly. “So I might as well cut out the middleman and just call myself.”
For “Lioness” and “Tulsa King,” Sheridan is doing something he’s never done before — hiring a writing team. He typically wrote every episode of his shows himself, but given his busy schedule, he had to distribute the work first. He knows it will test his skills as a showrunner after working as a lone wolf for so long.
“How do I delegate? How can I express myself to these writers in a way that they understand, so they can execute the design and stick to my vision? We’ll find out,” he notes.
As a storyteller, Sheridan says he doesn’t always have a crystal clear idea of how a series’ plot will unfold from episode to episode. But he always starts safely over the target.
“Just like with a feature film, you have to know how things are going to end before you know anything,” he says. “So I know how all these shows end. And then the question arises, how do we get there?”
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