Taylor Sheridan Says This Late, Great American Author Never Missed an Episode of ‘Yellowstone’ md20

Considering that Sheridan was the face of Paramount content for years, this move underlines the precarious nature of the media landscape, as well as Sheridan’s confidence in carrying his audience over to Peacock and other NBC platforms. One of Sheridan’s most ardent fans, the late Cormac McCarthy, will not witness this new phase of his career. According to Sheridan, McCarthy, the venerated author of Blood Meridian and The Road, never missed an episode of Yellowstone, which parallels McCarthy’s poetic treatment of the open country.

Taylor Sheridan Was Inspired by Author and ‘Yellowstone’ Fan Cormac McCarthy

Image via Paramount Network

Through critical adoration and his prolific output of shows, Taylor Sheridan has emerged as the poet laureate of the American West of the last decade. While the genre has been largely forgotten on the big and small screen, Sheridan is doing his best to keep it alive with screenplays like Sicario and Hell of High Water, and most notably, Yellowstone and its empire of spin-offs like 1883 and 1923. With other Paramount series like Tulsa King and Mayor of Kingstown, Sheridan has taken a special interest in lone law officials and outlaws that recall the stories inhabited by John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.

Before Sheridan, Cormac McCarthy, whose work also extended to short stories, plays, and screenplays, was the beating heart of the West in the modern day. His sparse prose captured the mind of the archetypal cowboy or lone figure in a Western backdrop. McCarthy’s bleak but life-affirming view of the world, crossed with his sobering take on violence, complemented his recurring backdrops of post-apocalyptic worlds and stirring Southern Gothic drama.

Unsurprisingly, McCarthy, who died in 2023, was a major influence on Sheridan, who revealed an even deeper connection to the author in a Gold Derby interview. “He never missed an episode,” Sheridan said of McCarthy, a devout fan of Yellowstone, starring Kevin Costner as the head of a cattle ranch in Montana. Sheridan was honored that McCarthy was fond of his interpretation of Westerns, even if Yellowstone is “punk rock,” breaking rules, and the equivalent to someone pointing “both middle fingers at TV and at Hollywood,” according to the showrunner. Sheridan was also inspired by McCarthy’s economical work ethic, who he claimed would only write for two hours per day from six to eight in the morning.

Taylor Sheridan Channels the Writing and Vision of Cormac McCarthy in His Neo-Westerns

While Yellowstone partakes in its fair share of revisionist and out-of-the-box storytelling, its mass appeal from older audiences and viewers in Middle America signaled that it flourished as a throwback to the primetime soaps of the ’70s and ’80s. Where most prestige cable television is trying to reinvent the wheel and subvert expectations, Yellowstone is refreshingly old school for most casual viewers and a reminder of the innate beauty and soul of the American heartland. The secret ingredient of Cormac McCarthy’s books was their hidden romanticism amid the ugliness and despair of his violent hellscapes and dystopias. The Road is a masterful portrait of a hopeful relationship between a father and son that perseveres through hunger and peril out of love and their unbreakable appreciation of life.

When it comes to an iconoclastic creative vision, McCarthy treated the writing process like one of his vast, open frontiers without rules. His minimal use of punctuation is startling on your first reading, but it develops a terse, poetic rhythm that is infectious on the page and adds a layer of subdued emotionality. Sheridan’s broad scope in all his shows often leads to frustrating plot holes and incomplete arcs, but its epic grandeur is a feature, not a storytelling bug, of the Yellowstone universe. Between All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men (adapted into a Best Picture-winning film by Joel and Ethan Coen), McCarthy shaped the framework of the neo-Western genre, which infused elements of noir and thriller, modernizing a genre reliant on tropes.

Despite having hundreds of things on his plate as a producer, Taylor Sheridan famously writes all the teleplays for his shows. This level of creative control is only earned by true autonomous visionaries. Cormac McCarthy’s long and storied career was also defined by the privilege to remain uncompromising and walk his own path. The journey of the American West from the country’s founding to the present will continue on television as long as Sheridan is active. Now, you’ll just have to find him on a new network.