A female CIA operative leads a dangerous undercover mission. A just-out-of-jail gangster relocates to the sticks. An oil company fixer deals with cartels, corporate intrigue and his chaotic ex-wife. A real-life cowboy, said to be the inspiration for The Lone Ranger, has his life more fully dramatized. And a man leading a private prison struggles to maintain order.
What all of these shows have in common – besides being massive hits for streaming service Paramount+ — is the involvement of one man: Taylor Sheridan. While TV remains an unpredictable business, Sheridan has become as close as a talent can get to representing a sure thing, launching one success after another. Sheridan often creates, executive produces and writes most of the episodes of every season. If his shows are cattle, he’s the lone cowboy.
And this is a rodeo people love to watch. During its most popular week, “Landman” was the second-most-watched title across streaming, accounting for 1.38 billion minutes viewed, according to Nielsen. It’s impressive for any show to secure a billion minutes in a single week, but the Billy Bob Thornton drama maintained its billion-plus reign for four of them consecutively.
Sheridan’s popularity is a level of pop-culture dominance that harkens back to a simpler, pre-streaming era of television, one where “Dynasty” and “Charlie’s Angels” producer Aaron Spelling’s name was synonymous with ABC while “All in the Family” creator Norman Lear was linked to CBS.
“It is no surprise that [Sheridan] admires and has been influenced by some of our greatest American writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry. Like them, he delves into themes related to the American experience and the core values that have shaped our nation’s identity,” Chris McCarthy, Co-CEO of Paramount Global as well as President and CEO of Showtime and MTV Entertainment Studios, told TheWrap. “This is why some of the most talented
actors in the world want to work with him – including many Oscar-nominated actors and winners that previously had not done TV before — and why together we have launched a record nine No. 1 series in row.”
In a day when the streaming landscape is more unstable than ever, with conglomerates scaling back after the initial direct-to-consumer boom and raiding their libraries for quick, consumer-friendly titles, Sheridan has carved out a unique niche. Sure, there’s his vast “Yellowstone” empire, which includes prequel series “1923” (its second season just premiered after a two-year absence), but Sheridan has become a unique comfort blanket.
Every series that he has created for Paramount+ has become the kind of sensation that’s the envy of other streamers. The series are eclectic, both in their plotlines and cast, and cater to a wide audience. Connected primarily by their reliance on big-name stars, the Taylor Sheridan frontier is rich and seemingly endless.
A ratings sure bet in an increasingly precarious TV climate
Sheridan’s show’s have long been vital to Paramount+, but the Sheridan-aissance didn’t happen in earnest until the fall of 2024. Starting in September, Paramount+ released new episodes of three Sheridan shows, all of which appeared on either Nielsen’s Top 10 Overall or Top 10 Originals streaming lists.
Those lists are often dominated by Netflix titles, which makes sense considering the streamer’s reach. By the end of 2024, Netflix reported that it had 301.6 million subscribers globally — an ocean compared to the 72 million subscribers Paramount+ reported during its third quarter of 2024. This is all to say it’s notable when any Paramount+ title cracks Nielsen’s lists, but the consistency and prevalence of Sheridan’s shows is especially impressive.
Sheridan’s best week happened on Dec. 2. During that seven-day period, three of his shows — “Landman,” “Lioness” and “Tulsa King” — accounted for a total of 1.8 billion minutes streamed.
“Landman” was consistently the most-streamed Sheridan show during this time period, averaging 919 million minutes during the 10 weeks it appeared on Nielsen’s streaming lists. That was followed by “Lioness” (510 million minutes over nine weeks) and the second season of “Tulsa King” (500 million minutes over 11 weeks).
As impressive as those numbers are, they don’t include Sheridan’s juggernaut “Yellowstone,” which only aired linearly during its final season. On its finale night, the series drew 11.4 million viewers, according to VideoAmp, the viewership measurement company Paramount was using at the time. That’s a larger audience than broadcast sibling CBS saw for the 2025 Golden Globes (10.1 million viewers).
With his run of hits, Sheridan has joined an elite list of modern showrunners that includes Dick Wolf, Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy — notable super producers adept at cranking out hits. Wolf’s “One Chicago” universe dominated NBC’s midseason ratings for 2024, and “FBI” is currently the fifth most-watched non-sports show on broadcast during the 2024-25 season. Meanwhile, all three seasons of Rhimes’ “Bridgerton” rank among the most-watched English-language Netflix shows of all time, with Season 1 securing 113.3 million views in its first 91 days. Rhimes is also behind “Grey’s Anatomy,” which ranks on Nielsen’s overall streaming list nearly every week.
As for Murphy, “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” is currently the third most watched English show on Netflix, responsible for 115.6 million views.
The difference between Sheridan and his peers is that Wolf, Rhimes and Murphy have seen their share of cancellations and commercial misfires over the years. Meanwhile, every scripted series Sheridan has touched thus far has turned into viewership gold for Paramount. The few shows that are no longer airing new episodes, like “1883” and “Yellowstone,” have ended rather than been axed.
Since “Mayor of Kingstown” premiered in 2021, Sheridan’s universe of shows has resulted in an estimated $263 million in subscriber revenue for Paramount+ in the U.S. and Canada regions, according to Parrot Analytics’ Streaming Economics model. As of third-quarter 2024, “Mayor of Kingstown” has brought in the most subscriber revenue for Paramount+, surpassing $60 million.
A strategy that “made up for lost time”
Six years ago, Sheridan was in a very different place than he is today. Around the time of the CBS and Viacom merger, “Yellowstone” had just completed its second season. Though it was a cable hit, McCarthy noted it was “very expensive” and didn’t rank among the 50 most-watched shows on linear TV. Because of this, the decision was made to license the SVOD rights for the show to Peacock to offset its costs.
“So, when I came on board, many people assumed canceling ‘Yellowstone’ was a forgone conclusion,” McCarthy said. “However, after connecting with Taylor, understanding his vision and doing a deep dive to forecast where there was a white space to build a universe that would unleash an untapped audience demand, I decided to double down – partnering with Taylor in his first TV overall [deal] and placing a bet that ‘Yellowstone’ could be the catalyst to unlock a bigger cultural phenomenon.”
That involved the controversial decision of moving “Yellowstone” to Sunday nights, when it would be in competition with the NFL, a gamble that resulted in the drama’s audience nearly tripling. It also set the stage for McCarthy and Paramount to further invest in this universe during a time when Westerns weren’t in vogue.
That also meant getting creative around the distribution rights around one of Paramount’s biggest hits. Peacock may have held the streaming rights to the show, but Paramount+ moved forward with the prequels “1883” and “1923,” which were exclusive to the streamer.
“To succeed, we need to identify subtle emerging signals, ones that are easily missed, of cultural trends that could go mass, in order to place calculated bets and make big hits that can transform our business,” McCarthy said. “By embracing this strategy and delivering against Taylor’s creative vision, we succeeded in overcoming the obstacle of not having ‘Yellowstone’ for SVOD and turned it into an opportunity to reinvent the model, which has driven Paramount+ to industry leading growth four years in a row.”
Three years after making his deal with Sheridan, McCarthy found himself in another difficult situation. When Paramount+ launched in 2021, it was the last major brand to introduce its streaming vertical. But instead of copying other streamers’ strategies of trying to be everything to everyone, Paramount+ narrowed its focus, investing in a smaller number of bigger series starring A-list actors.
“To make up for lost time, we designed a strategy betting against the status quo that the winners of the SVOD war won’t be the ones with the most content, but rather the ones with the biggest hits that break through the crowded and competitive landscape,” McCarthy said.
After delays caused by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, the fourth quarter of 2024 was the first time Paramount was able to put its plan into action, pairing returning hits like “Tulsa King,” “Lioness” and the “Dexter” prequel with new series like “Landman” and “The Agency.”
It’s a strategy that’s paid off. In its fourth quarter, Paramount+ was ranked as the No. 2 SVOD when it came to the most hours of original series’ watched, according to Nielsen. For comparison’s sake, the No. 1 SVOD service using this metric produces more than 15 times the number of original series as Paramount+, and the No. 3 SVOD produces nearly three times as many.
“Our content outpunches its weight class,” McCarthy said.
“Yellowstone” may have ended in December, but this universe isn’t slowing down anytime soon. There are currently four spinoffs in development at Paramount — “The Madison,” “6666,” “1944” and an untitled series that will focus on Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler.
“Looking ahead, in 2025, we have our strongest slate to date, which gives us great confidence that our momentum will continue,” McCarthy teased.
Shows that straddle the political line
One thing that helps Sheridan’s shows connect is they offer no overt political point-of-view. They are what you want them to be, in a way. Clearly the shows, especially those in the “Yellowstone” camp, appeal to red-blooded, perhaps Trump-voting middle America. (Last month French publication Le Monde called Sheridan the “showrunner darling of Trump’s America.”)
“The sheen of politics might be the X factor that makes [Sheridan’s] shows such a potent topic of discussion, but the thing that keeps people coming back has always been far more banal,” critic Nicholas Quah wrote for Vulture. “When Sheridan is in his bag, you’re watching competently executed genre television supercharged by a bigger-than-average budget."
While the shows possess elements of nostalgia, Sheridan is also committed to depicting the atrocities that accompanied the development of America. And while on “Landman,” Thornton might deliver a long monologue about how inept the idea of “clean energy” is, you also get the sense that it’s Sheridan merely vocalizing what someone like his character might think.
In addition, his casts are unusually diverse, especially given the material that he’s covering. “Lawmen: Lance Bass” star David Oyelowo, who played a real-life character in the Old West, said he took pride in the fact that the series loudly disrupted the narrative that “Taylor Sheridan is MAGA.”
Sheridan keeps his ideologies slippery on purpose. In 2022, when asked by the Atlantic about his earlier, anti-Trump sentiment, he backpedaled and blamed the remarks on lack of sleep and jet lag. Paramount later threatened to pull the writer of the story’s access unless the Trump conversation was dropped. The writer said no and the article (one of the only longform profiles of the prolific creator) proceeded.
In keeping with that general reluctance to do press, Sheridan declined to be interviewed for this story. But some of his stars were willing to discuss joining his empire.
“Well, for me, it was a revelation,” Harrison Ford told TheWrap of working on “1923,” adding of co-star Helen Mirren: “I took the job only because my friend there had signed up already, and knowing her, the wisdom of her choices and the opportunity that she alone presents. Forget about the script, I signed on knowing some of what Taylor had done, having had a very, very detailed conversation with him on our one meeting prior to shooting. He didn’t have anything really, except an ambition and a feeling that this was really an opportunity that couldn’t be denied.”
“When the scripts arrived, it was like a journey into the unknown, but as Harrison said, one had seen the work that Taylor had done before, so you knew you were in very, very good hands,” Mirren said. “You knew you were not going to be betrayed. He is an extraordinary writer and person, because he does it all himself. It’s not like you’re a part of a whole writing team of people. It’s one man. It’s one man’s vision and voice, which is so distinctive and so beautifully constructed.”
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