The Biggest Taylor Sheridan Controversies, Explained

As with his Yellowstone characters, Taylor Sheridan can be tricky to pin down. To some, Sheridan is a storyteller for populist masses unimpressed by prestige television, whose profitability makes him a hot commodity in Hollywood. To others, he’s a controlling TV producer with questionable casting practices, worse writing, and an ego the size of Dutton Ranch.

On his way to cable TV dominance, Sheridan has certainly rankled viewers, critics, and even actors. He even had a legal tussle with one of his Yellowstone stars, whose name — surprise, surprise — is not Kevin Costner.

Here are our selections for Sheridan’s biggest controversies, half of which were spurred or exacerbated by one viral 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter! Warning: Major Yellowstone spoilers ahead.

6. His lawsuit against Yellowstone star Cole Hauser

Apparently, Cole Hauser’s coffee venture left a bad taste in his Yellowstone boss’s mouth. In December 2023, Sheridan sued the actor, who was starring as Rip Wheeler on Yellowstone at the time, in the Northern District of Texas Federal Court. The suit claimed the logo of Hauser’s Free Rein coffee company too closely resembled that of Sheridan’s Bosque Ranch, which had its own coffee product.

Specifically, the suit alleged “trademark infringement, unfair competition and false advertising,” complaining that the logo was “confusingly similar to the BR Brand for virtually identical goods” and “irreparably damaging to Bosque Ranch” and alleging that Free Rein was trying to “mistake or to deceive as to the affiliation, connection, or association” with the ranch, per The Hollywood Reporter.

The legal matter percolated for a month before Sheridan’s legal team requested the suit be dismissed, according to Chron.

5. His casting of Kelsey Asbille in Yellowstone

In July 2017, nearly a year before Yellowstone’s premiere, actor Adam Beach called for a boycott of the show after Kesley Asbille scored the role of Monica Dutton, a Native character. “What got me jolted by it was that I have a lot of Native female actors that need a job,” Beach, a Saulteaux man, told BuzzFeed News. “I immediately called it out.”

A New York Times article posted the following month identified Asbille as having Taiwanese, British, and Eastern Band Cherokee descent. The Times reporter later told BuzzFeed News that Asbille identified herself as Cherokee and that the other descriptors of her lineage came from The Weinstein Company’s press materials related to her role in Sheridan’s Wind River.

In response to an inquiry, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ Tribal Enrollment Officer declared in a letter that Asbille “is not now nor has she ever been an enrolled member” of the tribe.

But Heather Rae, a film producer who cofounded the Native Networkers, told BuzzFeed News that enrollment status might not tell the full story. “Native identity and tribal affiliation is really complicated — mainly a result of genocide and Indian removal and assimilation efforts,” Rae said. “I know the tribe has an official position on tribal identification, but there are many Native people who understand the diaspora that separated families from tribal systems. … I certainly don’t take the position that Kelsey is not Cherokee, because I don’t know.”

4. His falling out with Kevin Costner

Anyone surprised by John Dutton’s ignominious death in the much-delayed back half of Yellowstone’s final season apparently missed Costner’s contentious exit from the Paramount Network hit and reports of Costner’s strict schedule demands as he tried to film his big-screen Horizon series.

In the aforementioned THR interview, Sheridan suggested he and Costner had a breakdown in communication. “I’ve never had an issue with Kevin that he and I couldn’t work out on the phone,” he said. “But once lawyers get involved, then people don’t get to talk to each other and start saying things that aren’t true and attempt to shift blame based on how the press or public seem to be reacting.”

Nearly a year later, Costner told Deadline he would have been happy to shoot his Season 5B scenes if the scripts had been ready. Furthermore, he said, he had trouble scheduling production on his passion project, Horizon, with Yellowstone’s moving targets. “I was straight up with [Sheridan], and he said what we would do, and I believed him, and we didn’t get there,” he said.

3. His taking credit for an MMIW law

Discussing his 2017 film Wind River in the THR interview, Sheridan credited the film with the 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which “expand[ed] special criminal jurisdiction of Tribal courts to cover non-Native perpetrators of sexual assault, child abuse, stalking, sex trafficking, and assaults on tribal law enforcement officers on tribal lands.”

Sheridan said, “[The film] actually changed a law, where you can now be prosecuted if you’re a U.S. citizen for committing rape on an Indian reservation, and there’s now a database for [Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, or MMIW]. … That law had a profound impact. All social change begins with the artist, and that’s the responsibility you have.”

That boast angered Native activists who had been advocating for MMIW for years. “Sheridan’s attempt to take credit for the passage of VAWA is gross and completely discredits years of tireless advocacy from the Native community,” attorney Mary Kathryn Nagle, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, said in a quote the organization IllumiNative shared online. “His movie Wind River perpetuates the myth that the FBI investigates MMIW cases. They do not. Sheridan should be apologizing, not taking credit for a victory secured by Indian Country advocates and led by Native women.”

2. His dismissive views toward collaborators

In the same THR interview, Sheridan defended writing the Yellowstone franchise solo — a decision that upset other Hollywood scribes, who were on strike at the time and demanding staffing minimums for writers’ rooms — and his friction with the writers he hired for his shows Tulsa King and Lioness. “I decided that I am going to tell my stories my way, period,” he said.

Sheridan also spoke dismissively about lower-level producers concerned about his TV shows’ budgets. “I don’t really give a s*** what a line producer or some physical production person thinks,” he said.

Observers lambasted Sheridan for his comments. “If you’re a person with even a modicum of power in this industry, let alone a lot of power, [and] you go out of your way to s*** on support staff, publicly or privately, I know all I need to know about you!” TV critic Maureen Ryan wrote on Twitter, per Pajiba.

And TV critic Walter Chaw wrote, Pajiba, “I know this looks bad, but I know several people who have worked with Taylor, and I just wanted to stand up and say that he’s apparently a lot worse — both as a creative and a human being — than a single article could possibly capture, no matter how damning. A real piece of s***.”

Related

Every Taylor Sheridan TV Show, Ranked

1. His treatment of female characters

Reddit is rife with complaints about Sheridan’s depiction of female characters. A sampling of post titles: “I’m convinced Taylor Sheridan doesn’t like women,” “Taylor Sheridan hates the Dutton Women, all women in general really,” “Tyler Sheridan should be banned from writing women in television,” and “Can we have a chat about how Taylor Sheridan [portrays] his female characters?”

And it’s not just armchair critics — it’s the professionals, too. “As a general rule, if there’s a woman on screen during Yellowstone, she’s either fighting, f***ing, crying, or yelling,” Salon culture editor Kelly McClure wrote. “I guess that’s the cowboy way?”

Added New York critic Andrea Long Chu, “In particular, Sheridan tends to treat Native women as sponges for historical trauma, before wringing them out on the white man’s brow. Monica has endured brain damage, home invasion, attempted rape, police strip search, and a ludicrous car accident during labor that kills her newborn son. She is also terrifically dull, a one-dimensional scold whom the show trots out like a museum docent to remind viewers who was here first.”