It’s not often that a TV show not only nails the zeitgeist but anticipates it—that zeitgeist being the election of Donald Trump and concomitant rebuke of the Democratic political-cultural agenda. Make that TV shows, plural, all from the ridiculously prolific keyboard of Taylor Sheridan. His massive hit Yellowstone spawned two prequels—1883 and 1923—and five more series: Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Lawmen: Bass Reeves,  Lioness, and, most recently, Landman. He did all of this in six years, after writing an Oscar-nominated script for a Texas bank-robber movie called Hell or High Water in 2016. If Sheridan told his patron studio, Paramount, that he wanted to do a show about paint drying, they’d find a way to air it. And back up a Brink’s truck to his Texas ranch for the privilege.

Such is the 54-year-old writer-director-producer’s Midas touch with “flyover country”—as New York and Hollywood have long dismissed their red-state viewership. Even more remarkable is how this unfettered clout is manifesting itself in his writing. He offered confusingly mixed political messages in the first couple of years of Yellowstone—though not so mixed that its audience didn’t immediately understand what he was trying to say and make the show the biggest hit on television, despite airing on the Paramount Network, which you had to search high and low for in your cable package. Now his mix of cultural conservatism, libertarian/Jeffersonian objection to federal overreach, and muscular foreign policy is fully out of the closet. Consider two typical Sheridan monologues.

The first is from Landman, a soapy-actiony drama that premiered in November 2024 and that’s set against the fracking-fueled West Texas oil boom. Billy Bob Thornton plays Tommy Norris, a roughneck fixer “landman” for a fictional wildcatting outfit called M-Tex. The company’s snarky young lawyer is surprised when Tommy tells her they use wind farms—what she calls “clean energy”—to power pumps so remote that they’re off the grid. He claps back, “They use alternative energy. There’s nothing clean about this.” She throws him a Zillennial eye roll: “Please, Mr. Oilman, tell me how wind is bad for the environment.” So he does—with impassioned, profane eloquence—as they stand under a towering 400-foot wind turbine that stands on a concrete pad that covers a third of an acre and sits 12 feet deep.

“Do you have any idea how much diesel they have to burn to mix that much concrete?” Tommy schools her. “Or make that steel? And haul this s—t out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You wanna take a guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that f—n’ thing? Or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of makin’ it. And don’t get me started on solar panels or the lithium in your Tesla battery. And never mind the fact that if the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow, we don’t have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities. It’d take 30 years if we started tomorrow.”