Guess Which Celebrated Novelist Loved <em>Yellowstone</em>

Anyone who is a fan of Taylor Sheridan’s work is surely impressed by the writer’s prolific output. When the Yellowstone creator is working on any one of his shows for Paramount, he's likely already penning his next project. In fact, in a new interview with Gold Derby alongside American Primeval director Peter Berg, Sheridan revealed that he wrote an entire Yellowstone season while directing another movie entirely.

“I found myself in a situation where I was writing scripts on the weekend to shoot the next week,” Sheridan said of writing Yellowstone season 2. “They did try to hire a room for Season 3, and the scripts were so bad that they called me back while I was directing [Those Who Wish Me Dead] in New Mexico with Angie [Jolie]… So, I wrote an episode of Yellowstone every Saturday.”

Sheridan revealed that he was inspired by the late American novelist Cormac McCarthy (The Road, No Country for Old Men), who only wrote two hours each day, from 6 A.M. to 8 A.M. “You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book,” McCarthy told Oprah Winfrey during a rare sit-down interview in 2007. “You probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You probably should be doing it.”

As it turns out, McCarthy was a “huge fan” of Yellowstone. “He never missed an episode,” according to Sheridan. “And you know, Yellowstone is a punk rock, rebellious teenage, both middle fingers at TV and at Hollywood [series]. I was relieved that he also liked the things that I actually tried to make good like 1923 and 1883. Not that I wasn't trying to make Yellowstone be an entertaining show, but it breaks so many storytelling rules. And it was part pandering, part horse porn at sunset.” If that Yellowstone horse porn would connect with anyone, it’s surely the All the Pretty Horses writer.

“There was such a thirst, that a Western done well is a universally loved genre,” Sheridan continued. “It captures everything American, this sense of freedom and vastness and independence. And there's a romance to it. You get on a 1,200-pound animal, and that thing trusts you, and you trust it, and you run 40 miles an hour. It's just so romantic and brutal and beautiful.”