Taylor Sheridan's American Frontier Trilogy Reignited the Western and Redefined It

If you’ve watched basically any edgy, modern take on the American West in recent years, there’s a good chance Taylor Sheridan had his fingerprints all over it. But in case you missed his rise: Sheridan wasn’t always the genre-defining powerhouse he is now. In fact, his first career looked pretty unremarkable on paper.

Sheridan: From 'Hey, Isn’t That Guy…?' to Genre Renaissance Man

For about fifteen years, Sheridan was just another working actor—lots of tiny parts, some recurring gigs, the kind of face you might vaguely recall but never quite name (unless you watched a lot of Sons of Anarchy reruns). Then out of nowhere: he sat down, typed out Sicario, and rewrote the trajectory not just of his own life, but for a whole genre everyone else had left for dead. Hollywood had basically stopped caring about Westerns, or even their modern cousins. Sheridan, on the other hand, couldn’t let go of that raw, wide-open American frontier and the outsiders who inhabit it.

Instead of the sepia-toned nostalgia or navel-gazing subversions that the Western had become, he wrote movies about contemporary America, unglamorous places, and people making brutal choices. Without him, those landscapes would still be wallpaper.

The American Frontier Trilogy: Sicario, Hell or High Water, Wind River

• Sicario (2015): Directed by Denis Villeneuve, with Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin. It’s technically a cartel thriller, but what it’s really about is what happens to decent people when the system is so broken that the lines between good and evil vanish. This was Sheridan’s big breakout—audiences and critics both loved it, and suddenly, his scripts weren’t getting tossed into the dustbin.
• Hell or High Water (2016): Imagine a dusty Texas crime spree crossed with a grim economic parable. Sheridan wrote it, David Mackenzie directed, and it starred Chris Pine and Ben Foster as brothers robbing banks, along with Jeff Bridges as the law on their tail. This script got Sheridan his first Oscar nomination.
• Wind River (2017): Sheridan jumped into the director’s chair for this one. Set in the icy isolation of a Wyoming reservation, it digs into grief, violence, and the ways justice blows away in the wind. Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen lead a cast that’s almost upstaged by the howling cold itself.

And here’s the thing: none of these movies is really about their so-called plot. They’re about survival—emotional, moral, physical. Sheridan’s trick was making these stories breathe through their locations, using weather and landscape as much as actors. You can practically feel the sweat, the frostbite, the tension pressing in on every scene.

'The American Frontier trilogy endures because none of the three movies is actually about their plot… the landscapes carry as much weight as the characters, and Sheridan made that one of his trademarks.'

Remember When the Western Died? Sheridan Would Like a Word.

Time for a bit of a reality check on the Western as a genre: It was huge, then it wasn’t. By the mid-70s, the market was flooded, the stories felt more like reruns than reinvention, and culture just moved away from gunslingers and black-and-white morality. For decades, Westerns became a novelty—sometimes someone would dig up an old trope for Oscar bait, but the genre didn’t really have a pulse. Even buzzy outliers like No Country for Old Men and 3:10 to Yuma didn’t spark a revival.

Sheridan’s movies weren’t just good; they convinced Hollywood—and audiences—that the skeleton of the Western could be transplanted anywhere, if you kept the core: desperation, impossible choices, people cut off from help. Strip away the period costumes, and that story plays just as well in a parched small town or on a snowy reservation. Sheridan didn’t just start a fire; he built a whole bonfire for everyone else to gather around.

Yellowstone and the Sheridan Expansion Pack

If you’re wondering just how much audiences missed these kinds of stories: cue Yellowstone. Five seasons, monster ratings, and a finale watched by more than 11 million people—blowing most network shows out of the water. The so-called 'Sheridanverse' is now massive, including:

• 1883
• 1923
• Tulsa King
• Lioness
• Landman
• The Madison
• And plenty more on the way

So yes—the Western, in its new modern shape, is maybe the most successful thing on television right now, and you can thank Taylor Sheridan’s American Frontier trilogy for setting the whole thing rolling.