THE TAYLOR SHERIDAN UNIVERSE: DID HE PREDICT THE CONSERVATIVE TURN OF THE AMERICAN VOTER?

This is the second part of my US 287 blog from a couple weeks back that showed the destruction of small-town American along a US highway. This is quite common no matter what state you happen to be driving through. Someone who has noticed this problem is writer and show runner extraordinaire Taylor Sheridan in his extremely good modern day Western  HELL OR HIGH WATER which shows this decay and destruction of Texas via its spectacular cinematography. How did Sheridan end up becoming the voice for a forgotten segment of the United States, middle America, and the generational decline that this region has experienced for going on almost half a Century?

Taylor Sheridan is a good-looking dude. He got started as an actor, appearing usually as a guest in dozens of television shows. His career finally took off when he got a recurring role on the FX show SONS OF ANARCHY. Not too long after completing his role, Sheridan wrote his first movie SICARIO, a nasty look at the Mexican cartel and border politics which ended up getting directed by one of the best living directors on the planet, Denis Villaneuve, from Quebec. The success of that movie led into an adaptation for the aforementioned HELL OR HIGH WATER followed by his directorial debut which he also wrote called WIND RIVER about a murder on a Native American reservation. Creating a new genre, the modern-day Western, the Paramount network took a risk on a television show created and written by Sheridan and the rest is now history. YELLOWSTONE became a cultural phenomenon appealing to middle America and conservatives. Just watching one commercial break with its Buffalo Trace Bourbon, Cowboy boots, and outdoor gear shows you that Sheridan discovered a new demographic that Hollywood had ignored up to this point. Since the creation of YELLOWSTONE, Sheridan has written and created seven television shows including two YELLOWSTONE prequels, all of which are very popular on the Paramount Plus Network. Sheridan moved to Montana in 2013 to raise his child before he began his writing career, and counting his purchase of the famous 6666 ranch in the Western Texas city of Guthrie, he owns over half a million acres of land in Texas, Montana, and Wyoming thanks to his Paramount shows.

YELLOWSTONE, despite often degrading into entire scenes of cowboys on horses doing cowboy things for ten-minute segments, had a very libertarian and conservative ethos. The Duttons were constantly in conflicts with Native Americans, the state of Montana, fellow ranchers, and most famously, vulture capitalists in the last few seasons to protect the land that as the prequels explain, they fought to maintain for over a century often through radical acts of violence. The violence often borders on absurdity until you realize how often events like this occurred in the Old West. There are two scenes recently from Sheridan’s shows LANDMAN and 1923 that explains clearly why conservatives have latched onto this expanded universe.

First, here is a clip from LANDMAN where Billy Bob Thornton’s character explains the problem with green (alternative) energy. An opinion I happen to share. All the windmills, solar panels, and batteries require the same “dirty” oil that the environmentalists demonize.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmbZwxEnAFc

In Season 2 of 1923, Sheridan really doubles down on the destruction of nature caused by industrialists that is perfectly represented by the Timothy Dalton character, the brutality of Catholic churches towards native Americans, and embracing the freedom of land ownership, the beauty of family while rejecting everything that a city and government has to offer. Whether you agree with Sheridan does not matter. He is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars of land and writing shows that continue to fascinate a large segment of the American population. But as these shows increase in popularity and with the results of the recent 2024 election that showed a very massive rightward swing of the American public especially among the youth (A fact I can confirm based on conversations with my daughter’s friends), Sheridan appears to have gotten ahead of a cultural paradigm shift.
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Since the late 1960s when the Vietnam War broke out, the United States has become a liberal nation. The Boomers, who were very radical leftists during their youth, have changed this country for the better and for the worse (Economics). Despite a few conservative moments in recent history (The Reagan years and the post-2001 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks), the United States has been a liberal nation biased towards the politics of large urban cities. With liberal politics, have come liberal policies. And before explaining what has backfired, can we really argue that the United States has not become a more tolerant nation towards ethnic groups and sexuality over the past 40 years? Socially and culturally with our entertainment, the 70s, 80s, and 90s were wonderful decades that evolved our culture in a mostly positive direction. Technology has evolved at a rapid rate that has allowed the entirety of human knowledge to be accessible at your fingertips. But with these positive changes have come increasing pockets of negativity. The COVID lockdowns of 2020-2021 were a cultural paradigm shift that exposed many liberal ideas as being fraudulent whether it was the Pharma industry and the now questionable efficacy of the vaccines that we have all received throughout our lives, to the question of climate change and whether it is real or not, to the defense industries demonization of countries like Iran while celebrating countries like Israel, as well as the out of control rise of governments being in every aspect of our lives which has led to increased authoritarianism and large amounts of money printing and spending leading to inflation, the experiment with left wing politics is dying in a sea of corruption and abuse of power. The Democrats have reached all-time lows in their popularity with no signs of a correction coming anytime soon. Understanding this radical political change which has been ongoing since COVID, the wheels are rolling towards a new conservative future. Taylor Sheridan tapped into something that was bubbling below the surface. And to his credit, he took advantage of it.