Taylor Sheridan rips studio execs and doesn’t want Emmys

Taylor Sheridan has built one of the most watched television empires in the world, and he wants everyone to know he’s done it without chasing trophies or taking notes from the people who sign his paychecks.

The creator of “Yellowstone” fired at studio and network brass during a performance “The Bill Simmons Podcast,” where he showed up to promote his new book “How Not to Die in Prison,” co-written with Tom Nelson. Sheridan, who has two series on this year’s Emmy ballot, the freshman drama “The Madison” and the second season of “Landman,” spoke to the sports podcaster about doing the opposite of what the industry told him to do.

“I knew it when I started writing [I wanted] to simply not do what everyone else was doing,” he said in the episode. “What everyone else did was take shortcuts, essentially breaking all the basic fundamental rules of storytelling because they couldn’t figure out their story. With a movie you have to show me what happens. The camera must set the story in motion. The dialogue should tell me what people in this world think about what is happening, what they hope to do, or what they would rather not have done or done.”

Sheridan got specific about some of the criticism he expected for “Countryman,” the Paramount+ drama that saw Demi Moore spend most of the first season by a pool. Sheridan admitted that she was told in advance that she would essentially be an extra in Season 1 before playing a central role in Season 2, and he knew exactly how that would play out. “The critics are coming after me. I don’t use it enough [Moore]I can’t write for women, all this nonsense. Then I’m going to kill your husband and you have to run the oil company. The critics and I – I don’t care what they think, and it irritates them that I don’t care. I’ll be the first to tell you that there are things I do that infuriate them a little, and this is one of them. Fuck them, honestly.”

The multihyphenate also took shots at Marvel as an example of the problem in Hollywood, saying its films rely on characters who “provide information dumps that you have to follow to get to action instead of actually moving the plot along with action.”

Sheridan, who lives outside Fort Worth, Texas, and has a place in Wyoming, reserved his harshest words for the executives who oversaw that work, saying they knew “nothing” about the story.

“It didn’t used to be that way when Steve McQueen was a movie star at Paramount and Bobby Evans ran the studio because writers were given free rein. Directors were completely let go. There were no endless rewrites. There were no meetings with executives about tone and mood and all this nonsense.”

He continued, “By the way, the studio executives and the network executives – these are, for the most part, marketing executives. Or maybe they went to law school or whatever. Then they came, got a job in the mailroom at CAA or WME and hated that shit. So then they ended up as interns at some network. Then, through exhaustion, they became heads of development. Well, what do you know about developing stories? You don’t know anything. So they get terrified and panic that the audience will get it don’t understand because they don’t actually have storytellers.”

Those executives, he said, now want character synopses “before we meet the character.”

He added: “Our company right now is really run by these executives because they’re the ones who are going to determine whether or not your script goes into production. They’re going to try to control every element of that.”

It’s a dynamic Sheridan said he declined when he signed his deal with Paramount. “This is not a democracy. There is no commission. You’re going to pay me and you’re going to give me a lot of money and I’m going to get you these shows. I’m pretty ordinary and I’m going to tell stories that ordinary people will understand. That’s most of America,” he said. “You’re not going to win Emmys with me, but I’m not trying to win Emmys either. That’s not my goal. My goal is to put someone on the couch and make them move, make them think, make them laugh, scare the hell out of them, excite them. That’s what I want to do, because that’s what I want from a show.”

At a time when productions in Los Angeles continue to struggle, Sheridan also said he has no interest in ever returning to the City of Angels.

“The only way you’re going to get me back to Los Angeles is if it secedes from the union and I get drafted into the military to take it back. It’s the only way,” he said. “I love New York. The way of that city, much stronger than any political wind blowing in any direction, right? While LA is built on sand.”