Taylor Sheridan found his calling in August 1989, when the television miniseries adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove (1985) debuted on CBS. Writer and producer of television megahit Yellowstone, and its prequels 1883 and 1923, Sheridan remembers in his foreword to the 40th Anniversary Edition of McMurtry’s epic:

Upon watching the film, I reread the novel yet again (for the fourth or fifth time? sixth, maybe), comparing my imagination to the adaptation. This is easily the most formative event in my life. My plan to pursue the family businesses of law enforcement and cattle raising was destroyed. In its place was an unquenchable thirst for storytelling.

Sheridan and McMurtry love to tell stories about one topic in particular: the closing of the American frontier, and its consequences for the American psyche. McMurtry wrote Lonesome Dove and other novels detailing its first closing, in the late 1800s. But Sheridan is our foremost storyteller of its latest closing. Yellowstone, which first aired from 2018 to 2024, is set in the modern day, in a once-pristine Montana valley now invaded by the last decade’s unprecedented domestic migration from the blue coasts to the red Mountain West.

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