Taylor Sheridan Is Sorry but His Characters Are Not

FQ columnist Rebecca Wanzo examines the complex and contradictory politics of Taylor Sheridan’s Westerns, focusing on the popular Paramount+ series Yellowstone. While often described as “red-state television”—referring to both its location and the presumed audience demographics—Yellowstone has conservative diegetic logic at the same time as it depicts white supremacists as antagonists and critiques racial profiling. Yellowstone’s “messiness” suggests to Wanzo that it may be time to acknowledge that there are some contexts in which the category of “conservative” may not do analytical justice to the complicated ways in which pleasure, genre history, and politics work.