‘Yellowstone’ creator says his volume of work ‘is not sustainable’

Taylor Sheridan’s television series Yellowstone has been a hit since its debut in 2018, just got renewed for a fifth season, and has given Sheridan the chance to develop nine new shows, but he says this is not a long-term life path.

“This volume of work is not sustainable for a long period of time. But it’s an opportunity to tell stories the way I want to tell them with a creative freedom that just doesn’t exist in this space. And so I kind of have to take advantage of it … I don’t necessarily want to be doing this when I’m 70. I don’t know that I want to be doing it when I’m 60. So I’d rather work real hard to do it now.”

Sheridan made the comments about his media empire to Variety today. One of his upcoming projects, Tulsa King, will be Sylvester Stallone’s first-ever television role, playing a lifetime mob figure banished to Oklahoma. Sheridan says the process of getting the project together only took a week during the early heights of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I was talking with a producer, and it’s COVID-19. Everyone’s kind of going stir-crazy. He was asking me about ideas. I said, ‘look, all you need in my opinion, to have an interesting TV show is take a really fascinating character and drop them in a world that we don’t know anything about. I call two days later and said, ‘hey, I wrote that thing we talked about.’ [Stallone got the script and he said] ‘I love it. When do we shoot it?'”

Tulsa King and Sheridan’s other shows — apart from Yellowstone, The Last Cowboy, Mayor of Kingstown, and 1883 – remain in various development stages. No release dates or episode orders for any are set as of this story’s filing.