But as the rare indie-oriented filmmaker who pays attention to plot, can Sheridan work within the open-ended nature of today’s serialized television? With ten episodes to work with in season one - the first of which, tonight’s “Daybreak,” is double length - Yellowstone should in the weeks ahead make great use of Sheridan’s knack for creating complicated characters and exploring where they live, while keeping their circumstances relevant to the modern world. Now here’s Yellowstone, a prestige drama that Sheridan’s writing and directing for Paramount, as part of the cable outlet’s swing at becoming a Peak TV player.
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He followed that up with the screenplay for Hell or High Water, which used a bank-robbery spree as the driver for a study of economic disparity in the modern American West and then he wrote and directed Wind River, another sophisticated and culturally specific neo-Western that (like all of Sheridan’s feature films so far) became a surprise hit. After starting his career as a character actor, playing the obstinate opposition in the likes of Sons of Anarchy and Veronica Mars, Sheridan made his screenwriting debut with Sicario, a vividly realistic thriller about the moral ambiguities involved in fighting drug trafficking on the U.S.–Mexico border.
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If you keep up with the movie business at all, you should already know Sheridan’s name - or, at the very least, his work. Yet despite the pricey production design and top-shelf cast, Yellowstone’s success or failure will ultimately come down to one person: the show’s writer-director-producer-creator Taylor Sheridan. Yellowstone even features a bona fide movie star as its lead: Kevin Costner, one of the few remaining Hollywood actors with extensive experience anchoring popular Westerns. Like Dallas crossed with the movie Giant, this expensive-looking TV show mixes soapy domestic melodrama with a sweeping, modernized take on the Western genre, set in and around a Montana ranch described as “the size of Rhode Island” - filled with huge houses, herds of animals, and dozens of employees. The Paramount Network’s first scripted dramatic series, Yellowstone, arrives with a swagger, intent on taking its place in the long, heady history of American stories about big, big money.