REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
Taylor Sheridan is a lot of things—the creator of the juggernaut Paramount+ series Yellowstone, the screenwriter of the acclaimed border thriller Sicario, and the owner of a Texas ranch that’s a quarter the size of Rhode Island. But as of this week, Sheridan has also emerged as a public enemy of striking WGA writers due to his contentious comments in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Though he claimed to THR that he broadly supports the WGA strike, the showrunner also said he disapproves of the guild’s minimum staffing demands, which includes a “minimum staff of six writers, including four Writer-Producers,” for pre-greenlight rooms. For Sheridan, a former character turned TV scribe who writes entire seasons of Yellowstone by himself, those demands don’t fit the way he prefers to run his shows.
“The freedom of the artist to create must be unfettered,” Sheridan told The Hollywood Reporter. “If they tell me, ‘You’re going to have to write a check for $540,000 to four people to sit in a room that you never have to meet,’ then that’s between the studio and the guild. But if I have to check in creatively with others for a story I’ve wholly built in my brain, that would probably be the end of me telling TV stories.”