After over a year hiatus, Yellowstone Season 5 Part 2 has begun production in Montana, as earlier promised and then revealed by Paramount Network Monday. The Western drama series approaches its close with the final episodes predicted to land in November later this year.
Four and a half seasons of the Taylor Sheridan series have followed the Dutton Family, led by patriarch Kevin Costner’s John Dutton, who oversees the largest cattle ranch in the modern-day United States. The Dutton family faces constant challenges from those at its borders — the growing Bozeman, Montana, the fictional Indian reservation of Broken Rock and America’s first national park.
With several prequel series and a contemporary spinoff in the works, the original installment was originally set to conclude at the end of 2023, but the WGA and SAG strikes delayed production on the final episodes.
Read on for what we know about Yellowstone Season 5 Part II:...
Four and a half seasons of the Taylor Sheridan series have followed the Dutton Family, led by patriarch Kevin Costner’s John Dutton, who oversees the largest cattle ranch in the modern-day United States. The Dutton family faces constant challenges from those at its borders — the growing Bozeman, Montana, the fictional Indian reservation of Broken Rock and America’s first national park.
With several prequel series and a contemporary spinoff in the works, the original installment was originally set to conclude at the end of 2023, but the WGA and SAG strikes delayed production on the final episodes.
Read on for what we know about Yellowstone Season 5 Part II:...
- 5/20/2024
- by Dessi Gomez
- Deadline Film + TV
Taylor Sheridan’s dedication to authenticity is unmatched, and he proved just how far he was willing to go for his art during the filming of a scene for his Yellowstone prequel series titled 1883. He actually risked a lot for this 2021 miniseries starring Sam Elliott & Tim McGraw to capture a pivotal scene, adding an unparalleled layer of authenticity to the gripping tale.
A still from Yellowstone, directed by Taylor Sheridan
The genius behind the cultural phenomenon of Yellowstone has not only given us a riveting portrayal of the Dutton family’s legacy, with coming attractions like the sequel show tentatively named 2024 but also two enthralling prequels—1883 and 1923.
Earlier this year, in an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, Sheridan shared some fascinating insights into the real history of the Wild West in the late 1800s that served as the inspiration for 1883.
From History Books to Screens: Taylor Sheridan’s Journey...
A still from Yellowstone, directed by Taylor Sheridan
The genius behind the cultural phenomenon of Yellowstone has not only given us a riveting portrayal of the Dutton family’s legacy, with coming attractions like the sequel show tentatively named 2024 but also two enthralling prequels—1883 and 1923.
Earlier this year, in an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, Sheridan shared some fascinating insights into the real history of the Wild West in the late 1800s that served as the inspiration for 1883.
From History Books to Screens: Taylor Sheridan’s Journey...
- 5/13/2024
- by Siddhika Prajapati
- FandomWire
[This story contains spoilers from 1883, 1923 and Yellowstone season five.]
With each new series in the megahit Yellowstone franchise, a new generation of Duttons emerges. After launching in 2018 with Kevin Costner’s central patriarch John Dutton and his immediate family, creator Taylor Sheridan traveled back in time to expand the franchise and introduce elder generations of Duttons, first with the single season of 1883 and now with the series 1923, which has been renewed for a second season.
The Dutton family tree has branched out as Yellowstone has been airing, with the flagship series currently at the halfway point in its fifth and final run. First, viewers followed James (Tim McGraw) and Margaret Dutton (Faith Hill) on their family’s treacherous journey west through the Great Plains in 1883, a trek that would ultimately lead to what becomes the Yellowstone ranch of the flagship series. And later, 1923 would introduce the audience to Jacob (Harrison Ford) and Cara Dutton (Helen Mirren), the Duttons who...
With each new series in the megahit Yellowstone franchise, a new generation of Duttons emerges. After launching in 2018 with Kevin Costner’s central patriarch John Dutton and his immediate family, creator Taylor Sheridan traveled back in time to expand the franchise and introduce elder generations of Duttons, first with the single season of 1883 and now with the series 1923, which has been renewed for a second season.
The Dutton family tree has branched out as Yellowstone has been airing, with the flagship series currently at the halfway point in its fifth and final run. First, viewers followed James (Tim McGraw) and Margaret Dutton (Faith Hill) on their family’s treacherous journey west through the Great Plains in 1883, a trek that would ultimately lead to what becomes the Yellowstone ranch of the flagship series. And later, 1923 would introduce the audience to Jacob (Harrison Ford) and Cara Dutton (Helen Mirren), the Duttons who...
- 9/25/2023
- by Jackie Strause
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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Since “1883” made its linear debut on Paramount Network, viewer consumption for the series on Paramount+ has surged 108%.
The “Yellowstone” prequel has also seen double-digit growth both among men 18-34 and among women 25-54, up 26% and 12%, respectively, as well as total viewers on Paramount Network, up 14% (1.7 million vs. 1.5 million).
The ratings boost follows up on the show’s initial success as the first night drew in an audience of 3.8 million viewers during its June 18 premiere. The Paramount Network airing became the biggest scripted series to debut on cable since 2020.
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“1883” first premiered December 2021 on Paramount+. At the time, the premiere was simulcast on the Paramount Network where 4.9 million linear viewers tuned in, marking the company’s biggest new series premiere...
Since “1883” made its linear debut on Paramount Network, viewer consumption for the series on Paramount+ has surged 108%.
The “Yellowstone” prequel has also seen double-digit growth both among men 18-34 and among women 25-54, up 26% and 12%, respectively, as well as total viewers on Paramount Network, up 14% (1.7 million vs. 1.5 million).
The ratings boost follows up on the show’s initial success as the first night drew in an audience of 3.8 million viewers during its June 18 premiere. The Paramount Network airing became the biggest scripted series to debut on cable since 2020.
Also Read:
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“1883” first premiered December 2021 on Paramount+. At the time, the premiere was simulcast on the Paramount Network where 4.9 million linear viewers tuned in, marking the company’s biggest new series premiere...
- 6/28/2023
- by Lucas Manfredi
- The Wrap
“Yellowstone” prequel “1883” drew in a total of 3.8 million linear viewers in its two-episode premiere on Paramount Network on Sunday night, becoming the biggest scripted series to premiere on cable since 2020.
The fresh viewership numbers come after the limited series first premiered in December 2021 on Paramount+. At the time, the premiere of “1883” was simulcast on the Paramount Network where 4.9 million linear viewers tuned in, making it the biggest new series premiere on cable since 2015.
The full season of “1883” will continue to air weekly on Paramount Network over the summer. The special broadcast includes extended featurettes at the end of each episode.
Also Read:
Taylor Sheridan’s ‘Special Ops: Lioness’ Gets July Premiere Date and First Teaser (Video)
“1883” follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains. It is a stark retelling of Western expansion, and an intense study of one family...
The fresh viewership numbers come after the limited series first premiered in December 2021 on Paramount+. At the time, the premiere of “1883” was simulcast on the Paramount Network where 4.9 million linear viewers tuned in, making it the biggest new series premiere on cable since 2015.
The full season of “1883” will continue to air weekly on Paramount Network over the summer. The special broadcast includes extended featurettes at the end of each episode.
Also Read:
Taylor Sheridan’s ‘Special Ops: Lioness’ Gets July Premiere Date and First Teaser (Video)
“1883” follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains. It is a stark retelling of Western expansion, and an intense study of one family...
- 6/21/2023
- by Lucas Manfredi
- The Wrap
True to its lineage as part of the Dutton-verse, Yellowstone prequel 1883 delivered a big audience for the start of its cable run.
The Paramount+ series, which premiered in late 2021, is getting a full-season run on Paramount Network over the summer, and it drew a lot of eyeballs for its June 18 debut on the cable outlet. The two-episode premiere drew 3.8 million viewers on its first night, including replays and simulcasts on five other Paramount Global cable channels. The two episodes on Paramount Network averaged 1.52 million viewers, and simulcasts on Comedy Central, CMT, MTV, Pop and TV Land added about a million more to each episode. Replays contributed the rest.
That’s a strong showing, particularly considering that 1883 has been available to stream in its entirety for more than a year. In fact, were it a new series, it would be the most watched scripted debut on cable since The Walking Dead: World Beyond...
The Paramount+ series, which premiered in late 2021, is getting a full-season run on Paramount Network over the summer, and it drew a lot of eyeballs for its June 18 debut on the cable outlet. The two-episode premiere drew 3.8 million viewers on its first night, including replays and simulcasts on five other Paramount Global cable channels. The two episodes on Paramount Network averaged 1.52 million viewers, and simulcasts on Comedy Central, CMT, MTV, Pop and TV Land added about a million more to each episode. Replays contributed the rest.
That’s a strong showing, particularly considering that 1883 has been available to stream in its entirety for more than a year. In fact, were it a new series, it would be the most watched scripted debut on cable since The Walking Dead: World Beyond...
- 6/21/2023
- by Rick Porter
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Remember when 1883 Season 1 launched on Paramount Network out of Yellowstone?
At the time, a handful of episodes aired before viewers had to stream the rest of the episodes on Paramount+.
It caused a lot of commotion amongst fans who did not have the streaming service.
Thankfully, those fans are getting their wish and will be able to watch all episodes of 1883 this summer on Paramount Network.
1883, the Yellowstone Origin story, will air weekly on Paramount Network beginning Sunday, June 18 at 8 Pm Et/Pt.
The good TV news doesn't stop there, either.
The special broadcast will include extended featurettes at the end of each episode, meaning 1883 fanatics can get an inside look at how the episodes were made, among other things.
1883 follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of untamed America.
It is a stark retelling of Western expansion,...
At the time, a handful of episodes aired before viewers had to stream the rest of the episodes on Paramount+.
It caused a lot of commotion amongst fans who did not have the streaming service.
Thankfully, those fans are getting their wish and will be able to watch all episodes of 1883 this summer on Paramount Network.
1883, the Yellowstone Origin story, will air weekly on Paramount Network beginning Sunday, June 18 at 8 Pm Et/Pt.
The good TV news doesn't stop there, either.
The special broadcast will include extended featurettes at the end of each episode, meaning 1883 fanatics can get an inside look at how the episodes were made, among other things.
1883 follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of untamed America.
It is a stark retelling of Western expansion,...
- 6/7/2023
- by Paul Dailly
- TVfanatic
1883 is headed to Paramount Network this summer. After being released as a Paramount+ exclusive, viewers will now see the entire limited series on the cable network. There are 10 episodes of the Taylor Sheridan series.
Starring Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, and James Landry Hebert, the historical drama is a prequel to Yellowstone. It shows a post-Civil war generation of the Dutton family as they leave Tennessee and head west to make a new life for themselves.
Read More…...
Starring Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, and James Landry Hebert, the historical drama is a prequel to Yellowstone. It shows a post-Civil war generation of the Dutton family as they leave Tennessee and head west to make a new life for themselves.
Read More…...
- 5/7/2023
- by TVSeriesFinale.com
- TVSeriesFinale.com
As Paramount Network’s “Yellowstone” comes to a close, fans will be able to catch the prequel Paramount+ series, “1883” on the network this June.
Paramount Network will air the full season of the Paramount+ limited series beginning Sunday, June 18 at 8 p.m., with subsequent episodes dropping weekly thereafter. In addition to airing all 10 episodes, the network’s special broadcast will include extended featurettes at the end of each episode.
The series follows the origins of the Dutton family as they embark on a journey out west and through the Great Plains. According to the official logline, “It is a stark retelling of Western expansion, and an intense study of one family fleeing poverty to seek a better future in America’s promised land – Montana.”
Created by Taylor Sheridan, “1883” stars Sam Elliott, Billy Bob Thornton, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Marc Rissmann, Audie Rick, Eric Nelsen and James Landry Hébert.
Paramount Network will air the full season of the Paramount+ limited series beginning Sunday, June 18 at 8 p.m., with subsequent episodes dropping weekly thereafter. In addition to airing all 10 episodes, the network’s special broadcast will include extended featurettes at the end of each episode.
The series follows the origins of the Dutton family as they embark on a journey out west and through the Great Plains. According to the official logline, “It is a stark retelling of Western expansion, and an intense study of one family fleeing poverty to seek a better future in America’s promised land – Montana.”
Created by Taylor Sheridan, “1883” stars Sam Elliott, Billy Bob Thornton, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Marc Rissmann, Audie Rick, Eric Nelsen and James Landry Hébert.
- 5/5/2023
- by Charna Flam
- Variety Film + TV
The full season of Paramount+’s awarding Yellowstone prequel limited series 1883 is headed to Paramount Network.
The special broadcast begins Sunday, June 18 at 8 Pm Et/Pt and will include extended featurettes at the end of each episode.
Created by Sheridan, 1883 follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of untamed America. It is a stark retelling of Western expansion, and an intense study of one family fleeing poverty to seek a better future in America’s promised land — Montana.
The series stars Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Billy Bob Thornton, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Marc Rissmann, Audie Rick, Eric Nelsen and James Landry Hébert.
1883 hails from MTV Entertainment Studios, with production partners 101 Studios and Bosque Ranch Productions. The series is executive produced by Sheridan, John Linson, Art Linson, David C. Glasser, Ron Burkle and Bob Yari.
The special broadcast begins Sunday, June 18 at 8 Pm Et/Pt and will include extended featurettes at the end of each episode.
Created by Sheridan, 1883 follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of untamed America. It is a stark retelling of Western expansion, and an intense study of one family fleeing poverty to seek a better future in America’s promised land — Montana.
The series stars Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Billy Bob Thornton, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Marc Rissmann, Audie Rick, Eric Nelsen and James Landry Hébert.
1883 hails from MTV Entertainment Studios, with production partners 101 Studios and Bosque Ranch Productions. The series is executive produced by Sheridan, John Linson, Art Linson, David C. Glasser, Ron Burkle and Bob Yari.
- 5/5/2023
- by Denise Petski
- Deadline Film + TV
The following article contains spoilers for "1923."
The juggernaut "Yellowstone" started creator Taylor Sheridan's Dutton family universe. The series, set in the present day, has spawned the prequels "1883" and "1923," giving fans the tragic backstory of the ranching family in Montana. Like "1883" did with Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, who played Margaret and James Dutton, "1923" nabbed some big-name actors in Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, who play Jacob and Cara Dutton.
The saga of the Dutton family is a dark one, with James and Margaret's daughter Elsa (Isabel May) dying from an arrow wound in "1883." James dies after an attack, and Margaret freezes to death in the snow. Jacob and Cara come to take over the ranch and raise the surviving sons John (James Badge Dale) and Spencer (Brandon Sklenar). That isn't the end of the deaths, though, and John Dutton (who was played by Audie Rick...
The juggernaut "Yellowstone" started creator Taylor Sheridan's Dutton family universe. The series, set in the present day, has spawned the prequels "1883" and "1923," giving fans the tragic backstory of the ranching family in Montana. Like "1883" did with Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, who played Margaret and James Dutton, "1923" nabbed some big-name actors in Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, who play Jacob and Cara Dutton.
The saga of the Dutton family is a dark one, with James and Margaret's daughter Elsa (Isabel May) dying from an arrow wound in "1883." James dies after an attack, and Margaret freezes to death in the snow. Jacob and Cara come to take over the ranch and raise the surviving sons John (James Badge Dale) and Spencer (Brandon Sklenar). That isn't the end of the deaths, though, and John Dutton (who was played by Audie Rick...
- 4/16/2023
- by Jenna Busch
- Slash Film
In his "Yellowstone" prequel series "1923," Taylor Sheridan turns back time to shed further light on the Dutton family history. The Duttons have been living on the Yellowstone Ranch since the late 1800s, and ever since then, it has been an uphill battle for them to preserve their legacy, amidst constant in-fighting and external rivalries. "1923" continues the tradition of putting legacy above everything else — the story follows Jacob (Harrison Ford) and Cara (Helen Mirren) Dutton, who are seen shouldering the responsibility of caring for James Dutton's family alongside the ranch. This is no easy task during the Prohibition era, especially right after World War I, and the onset of what will later be known as The Great Depression.
James Badge Dale plays John Dutton I (the great-grandfather of Kevin Costner's John Dutton III (it can get confusing as there are many Johns in the Dutton family), who emerges...
James Badge Dale plays John Dutton I (the great-grandfather of Kevin Costner's John Dutton III (it can get confusing as there are many Johns in the Dutton family), who emerges...
- 4/15/2023
- by Debopriyaa Dutta
- Slash Film
The Yellowstone universe is expanding yet again, this time with another generation of Duttons in the 1940s. On the heels of 1883 and 1923, Taylor Sheridan’s new Yellowstone prequel 1944 is officially in the works. And once again, fans should expect to see new Dutton faces when the official cast list is revealed.
Darren Mann as Jack and Michelle Randolph as Elizabeth | Christopher Saunders/Paramount+ The ‘Yellowstone’ prequels are introducing fans to every Dutton ranching generation
Yellowstone fans met the first generation of Duttons in the limited series 1883, which starred Tim McGraw and Faith Hill as James and Margaret Dutton. Those episodes told the story of how they traveled the Oregon Trail with their children — Elsa (Isabel May) and John (Audie Rick) — and how they chose the land in Montana that would eventually become the Dutton Ranch in Yellowstone.
The prequel 1923 introduced the next generation of Duttons after James and Margaret’s passing.
Darren Mann as Jack and Michelle Randolph as Elizabeth | Christopher Saunders/Paramount+ The ‘Yellowstone’ prequels are introducing fans to every Dutton ranching generation
Yellowstone fans met the first generation of Duttons in the limited series 1883, which starred Tim McGraw and Faith Hill as James and Margaret Dutton. Those episodes told the story of how they traveled the Oregon Trail with their children — Elsa (Isabel May) and John (Audie Rick) — and how they chose the land in Montana that would eventually become the Dutton Ranch in Yellowstone.
The prequel 1923 introduced the next generation of Duttons after James and Margaret’s passing.
- 2/17/2023
- by Perry Carpenter
- Showbiz Cheat Sheet
Yellowstone and its prequel shows 1883 and 1923, have caused some confusion about the Dutton family tree. At first, it seemed clear that Kevin Costner’s John Dutton is the grandson of Jack Dutton and Elizabeth Strafford from 1923. However, the show’s first four episodes hint that Spencer could be John’s grandfather. As of now, Brandon Sklenar doesn’t know exactly how Spencer fits into the family tree.
Brandon Sklenar as Spencer Dutton and Julia Schlaepfer as Alexandra in ‘1923’ | Emerson Miller/Paramount+ Kevin Costner’s John Dutton might not be Jack and Elizabeth’s grandson
1883 introduced John Dutton Sr. (Audie Rick) as a five-year-old boy. John survived the dangerous trek to Montana, though his older sister Elsa died once she reached their new home. Years later, John’s parents James and Margaret, had another son named Spencer.
John Sr. and Spencer’s parents both died when they were young, and their...
Brandon Sklenar as Spencer Dutton and Julia Schlaepfer as Alexandra in ‘1923’ | Emerson Miller/Paramount+ Kevin Costner’s John Dutton might not be Jack and Elizabeth’s grandson
1883 introduced John Dutton Sr. (Audie Rick) as a five-year-old boy. John survived the dangerous trek to Montana, though his older sister Elsa died once she reached their new home. Years later, John’s parents James and Margaret, had another son named Spencer.
John Sr. and Spencer’s parents both died when they were young, and their...
- 1/27/2023
- by Erica Scassellati
- Showbiz Cheat Sheet
The catalyst of 1923 has already arrived and now, as the Yellowstone prequel prepares to head into the second half of its season, creator Taylor Sheridan’s vision is coming into focus.
“I chose that moment in time [year 1923] to peek back in because you’re seeing the children that we’ve met in 1883 attempting to raise another generation of Dutton,” says Sheridan in a Paramount+ video and The Hollywood Reporter exclusive (below).
When explaining why he picked the year of 1923 to retrace Dutton family lineage, the creator adds that the next prequel chapter in the Yellowstone universe arrives in the backdrop of “a time of great drought, at a time of Prohibition, at a time of all this expansion — the Wild West was truly becoming a relevant center of resources.”
The surviving child viewers had already met from 1883 was young John (Audie Rick), who grew up to become the John Dutton Sr.
“I chose that moment in time [year 1923] to peek back in because you’re seeing the children that we’ve met in 1883 attempting to raise another generation of Dutton,” says Sheridan in a Paramount+ video and The Hollywood Reporter exclusive (below).
When explaining why he picked the year of 1923 to retrace Dutton family lineage, the creator adds that the next prequel chapter in the Yellowstone universe arrives in the backdrop of “a time of great drought, at a time of Prohibition, at a time of all this expansion — the Wild West was truly becoming a relevant center of resources.”
The surviving child viewers had already met from 1883 was young John (Audie Rick), who grew up to become the John Dutton Sr.
- 1/12/2023
- by Jackie Strause
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Harrison Ford is fixing up a Dutton family tree to find out how “1923” led to “Yellowstone.”
The Paramount+ cinematic universe, created by Taylor Sheridan, has spurred multiple spin-offs, including fellow prequel series “1893.” Ford’s co-star James Badge Dale revealed that the “1923” cast has tried to determine all of the relations leading up to “Yellowstone” patriarch John Dutton, played by Kevin Costner. [Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for “1923.”]
“This was the running joke. Harrison and I would be like, ‘I think we’re related, I don’t know how,'” Dale told The Hollywood Reporter of tracing back their characters’ lineages to Costner’s role. “We all need a flow chart.”
Dale continued, “I don’t know the tree. I’ve seen [flow charts] online, when people have tried to create them. I don’t know if those are accurate or not. And here’s the thing, this is Taylor [Sheridan’s] universe. We could be saying one thing or thinking one thing,...
The Paramount+ cinematic universe, created by Taylor Sheridan, has spurred multiple spin-offs, including fellow prequel series “1893.” Ford’s co-star James Badge Dale revealed that the “1923” cast has tried to determine all of the relations leading up to “Yellowstone” patriarch John Dutton, played by Kevin Costner. [Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for “1923.”]
“This was the running joke. Harrison and I would be like, ‘I think we’re related, I don’t know how,'” Dale told The Hollywood Reporter of tracing back their characters’ lineages to Costner’s role. “We all need a flow chart.”
Dale continued, “I don’t know the tree. I’ve seen [flow charts] online, when people have tried to create them. I don’t know if those are accurate or not. And here’s the thing, this is Taylor [Sheridan’s] universe. We could be saying one thing or thinking one thing,...
- 1/6/2023
- by Samantha Bergeson
- Indiewire
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The Yellowstone timeline continues with 1923, the Golden Globes-nominated neo-Western drama’s latest prequel series that delves into the Dutton family legacy.
Picksing up where Yellowstone’s first spinoff, 1883, left off, 1923 and “will introduce a new generation of Duttons led by patriarch Jacob (Harrison Ford) and matriarch Cara (Helen Mirren), [and will] explore the early 20th century when pandemics, historic drought, the end of Prohibition and the Great Depression all plague the mountain west and the Duttons who call it home,” per the show’s official synopsis.
For those who need a Dutton family tree refresher, Ford’s character is the brother of James Dutton (played by Tim McGraw in 1883), the great-great-great-grandfather of John Dutton III (played by Kevin Costner in the modern-day...
If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, The Hollywood Reporter may receive an affiliate commission.
The Yellowstone timeline continues with 1923, the Golden Globes-nominated neo-Western drama’s latest prequel series that delves into the Dutton family legacy.
Picksing up where Yellowstone’s first spinoff, 1883, left off, 1923 and “will introduce a new generation of Duttons led by patriarch Jacob (Harrison Ford) and matriarch Cara (Helen Mirren), [and will] explore the early 20th century when pandemics, historic drought, the end of Prohibition and the Great Depression all plague the mountain west and the Duttons who call it home,” per the show’s official synopsis.
For those who need a Dutton family tree refresher, Ford’s character is the brother of James Dutton (played by Tim McGraw in 1883), the great-great-great-grandfather of John Dutton III (played by Kevin Costner in the modern-day...
- 12/19/2022
- by Danielle Directo-Meston
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
The highly anticipated prequel series, 1923 debuts Sunday, Dec. 18, giving the insatiable Yellowstone audience a new generation of the first family of Montana to meet.
Set 40 years after the events of the smash hit limited series, 1883, we join the growing Dutton clan struggling to survive drought, lawlessness, and a clash between those trying to whittle out a patch of land for themselves. This all takes place under the shadow of Montana’s great depression, heightening the tension and the battle to build an empire in impossible times. Worst of all, to anyone familiar with the modern-day Yellowstone, the Duttons have to contend with all this during the era of prohibition.
With an absolutely stellar cast including legends of the screen, recent tv icons and exciting up-and-coming young actors, let’s break down what to expect from the cast and their characters.
Harrison Ford as Jacob Dutton
In 1883, we stood behind the...
Set 40 years after the events of the smash hit limited series, 1883, we join the growing Dutton clan struggling to survive drought, lawlessness, and a clash between those trying to whittle out a patch of land for themselves. This all takes place under the shadow of Montana’s great depression, heightening the tension and the battle to build an empire in impossible times. Worst of all, to anyone familiar with the modern-day Yellowstone, the Duttons have to contend with all this during the era of prohibition.
With an absolutely stellar cast including legends of the screen, recent tv icons and exciting up-and-coming young actors, let’s break down what to expect from the cast and their characters.
Harrison Ford as Jacob Dutton
In 1883, we stood behind the...
- 12/16/2022
- by Alec Bojalad
- Den of Geek
After some confusion surrounding the future of the 1883 television series, we finally have some clarification. There will be a second season and it will revolve around real-life lawman Bass Reeves with David Oyelowo in the lead role.
Streaming on the Paramount+ subscription service, the 1883 TV show debuted in December and the first season follows a previous generation of Yellowstone's Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plain, to establish what would eventually become the Yellowstone Ranch. Season one stars Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, and James Landry Hebert with Dawn Olivieri, Emma Malouff, Alex Fine, Gratiela Brancusi, Anna Fiamora, Amanda Jaros, Nichole Galicia, Stephanie Nur, Noah Le Gros, and Martin Sensmeier in recurring roles. Guest stars include Billy Bob Thornton, Graham Greene,...
Streaming on the Paramount+ subscription service, the 1883 TV show debuted in December and the first season follows a previous generation of Yellowstone's Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plain, to establish what would eventually become the Yellowstone Ranch. Season one stars Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, and James Landry Hebert with Dawn Olivieri, Emma Malouff, Alex Fine, Gratiela Brancusi, Anna Fiamora, Amanda Jaros, Nichole Galicia, Stephanie Nur, Noah Le Gros, and Martin Sensmeier in recurring roles. Guest stars include Billy Bob Thornton, Graham Greene,...
- 5/20/2022
- by TVSeriesFinale.com
- TVSeriesFinale.com
Bass Reeves, a previously announced limited series produced by Yellowstone co-creator Taylor Sheridan, will now be an offshoot of Yellowstone prequel 1883 at Paramount+. The news was revealed as part of MTV Entertainment Studios’ upfront on Wednesday.
Now titled 1883: The Bass Reeves Story, the limited series stars Emmy-nominated David Oyelowo as Reeves, a legendary lawman of the Wild West. Known as the greatest frontier hero in American history, and also believed to be the inspiration for The Lone Ranger. Reeves worked in the post-Reconstruction era as a federal peace officer in the Indian Territory, capturing over 3,000 of the most dangerous criminals without ever being wounded.
Oyelowo was previously announced to star in the limited series (fka Bass Reeves) as the first project under his and wife Jessica Oyelowo’s overall deal with MTV Entertainment Studios via their Yoruba Saxon Productions.
1883: The Bass Reeves Story will be executive produced by Sheridan,...
Now titled 1883: The Bass Reeves Story, the limited series stars Emmy-nominated David Oyelowo as Reeves, a legendary lawman of the Wild West. Known as the greatest frontier hero in American history, and also believed to be the inspiration for The Lone Ranger. Reeves worked in the post-Reconstruction era as a federal peace officer in the Indian Territory, capturing over 3,000 of the most dangerous criminals without ever being wounded.
Oyelowo was previously announced to star in the limited series (fka Bass Reeves) as the first project under his and wife Jessica Oyelowo’s overall deal with MTV Entertainment Studios via their Yoruba Saxon Productions.
1883: The Bass Reeves Story will be executive produced by Sheridan,...
- 5/18/2022
- by Denise Petski
- Deadline Film + TV
Paramount+ has announced that Academy Award winner Helen Mirren and Academy Award nominee Harrison Ford will star in the highly anticipated next chapter of the Yellowstone origin story, 1932 (working title). The latest installment in the Dutton family saga comes from perennial television workhorse Taylor Sheridan, whose work on Yellowstone, 1883 and Mayor of Kingstown has made him the golden ticket for Paramount Network and Paramount+. Yellowstone broke audience records for cable, only to be overshadowed by the performance of 1883, which became the most-watched title ever on Paramount+ worldwide.
Here is everything we know about the series.
1932 – Yellowstone Prequel Cast
Aside from the blockbuster announcement of these two legends of the screen, Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, no other cast members at this time have been officially announced. However, it is certainly safe to assume that Sheridan may once again dip into the pool of actors he has used before.
Read more...
Here is everything we know about the series.
1932 – Yellowstone Prequel Cast
Aside from the blockbuster announcement of these two legends of the screen, Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, no other cast members at this time have been officially announced. However, it is certainly safe to assume that Sheridan may once again dip into the pool of actors he has used before.
Read more...
- 5/18/2022
- by Alec Bojalad
- Den of Geek
“I embraced the challenge of it,” declares Tim McGraw about the experience of filming “1883,” the critically-acclaimed prequel to the hit drama “Yellowstone.” This 10-episode limited series follows the Dutton family as they travel from Texas to Montana, settling in the land that eventually becomes the Yellowstone Ranch. McGraw stars as James Dutton, a former Confederate soldier traveling with his wife Margaret, played by McGraw’s own wife Faith Hill, daughter Elsa (Isabel May) and son John (Audie Rick). Watch our exclusive video interview with the three-time Grammy winner above.
Series creator Taylor Sheridan, who also wrote all 10 episodes, is notorious for his commitment to authenticity, something that McGraw says only made his job easier. “I found the way he writes and the descriptions of the scener very liberating as an actor,” he says. “I think it gave me room to just learn the words and know the words. And if you knew the words,...
Series creator Taylor Sheridan, who also wrote all 10 episodes, is notorious for his commitment to authenticity, something that McGraw says only made his job easier. “I found the way he writes and the descriptions of the scener very liberating as an actor,” he says. “I think it gave me room to just learn the words and know the words. And if you knew the words,...
- 5/5/2022
- by Tony Ruiz
- Gold Derby
Exclusive: Gratiela Brancusi, the Romanian actress who recently found her first major role in Taylor Sheridan’s 1883, has signed with Elevate Entertainment for management in all areas.
Paramount+’s Western drama is a prequel to the hit Paramount Network series Yellowstone that follows the Dutton rancher family on a journey west through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of uncolonized America. Brancusi stars alongside Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Sam Elliott, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Marc Rissmann, Audie Rick, Eric Nelsen, James Landry Hébert and more. She plays Noemi, a Romani widow who is forced to raise two young boys on her own following the loss of her husband, coming to depend on, and develop a romantic interest in, Garrett’s Pinkerton agent Thomas.
The relative newcomer’s role in the show, which premiered in December, wound up being a major one, with Brancusi featuring in the majority of its 10-episode first season.
Paramount+’s Western drama is a prequel to the hit Paramount Network series Yellowstone that follows the Dutton rancher family on a journey west through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of uncolonized America. Brancusi stars alongside Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Sam Elliott, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Marc Rissmann, Audie Rick, Eric Nelsen, James Landry Hébert and more. She plays Noemi, a Romani widow who is forced to raise two young boys on her own following the loss of her husband, coming to depend on, and develop a romantic interest in, Garrett’s Pinkerton agent Thomas.
The relative newcomer’s role in the show, which premiered in December, wound up being a major one, with Brancusi featuring in the majority of its 10-episode first season.
- 3/2/2022
- by Matt Grobar
- Deadline Film + TV
Despite Paramount+ ordering more episodes of Yellowstone spinoff 1883, the series will not be back for a second season at the streaming service.
Just one day after 1883 Season 1 Episode 10 dropped on the streaming service, the creator dropped the news that the show was only ever supposed to tell a closed-ended story.
“I created this peek through time to show you this one specific journey,” Taylor Sheridan confirmed to Deadline.
“I’m not someone who likes to tie everything up in a bow and explain how everyone lived happily ever after, or didn’t.”
“For me, as a storyteller it feels close-ended,” Sheridan said of the first Yellowstone spinoff.
“I’m going to peek through the window of a different era and see what I see then.”
The "different era," is 1932, which landed a formal pickup during the Paramount+ investor day earlier this month.
That same day, the streaming service said that...
Just one day after 1883 Season 1 Episode 10 dropped on the streaming service, the creator dropped the news that the show was only ever supposed to tell a closed-ended story.
“I created this peek through time to show you this one specific journey,” Taylor Sheridan confirmed to Deadline.
“I’m not someone who likes to tie everything up in a bow and explain how everyone lived happily ever after, or didn’t.”
“For me, as a storyteller it feels close-ended,” Sheridan said of the first Yellowstone spinoff.
“I’m going to peek through the window of a different era and see what I see then.”
The "different era," is 1932, which landed a formal pickup during the Paramount+ investor day earlier this month.
That same day, the streaming service said that...
- 2/28/2022
- by Paul Dailly
- TVfanatic
How difficult will the Dutton family's journey become in the first season of the 1883 TV show on Paramount+? As we all know, the Nielsen ratings typically play a big role in determining whether a TV show like 1883 is cancelled or renewed for season two. Paramount+ and other streaming platforms, however, collect their own data. If you've been watching this TV series, we'd love to know how you feel about the first season episodes of 1883 here. *Status update below.
A Paramount+ Western series, the 1883 TV show is a prequel to Yellowstone. It stars Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, and James Landry Hebert with Dawn Olivieri, Emma Malouff, Alex Fine, Gratiela Brancusi, Anna Fiamora, Amanda Jaros, Nichole Galicia, Stephanie Nur, Noah Le Gros, and Martin Sensmeier in...
A Paramount+ Western series, the 1883 TV show is a prequel to Yellowstone. It stars Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, and James Landry Hebert with Dawn Olivieri, Emma Malouff, Alex Fine, Gratiela Brancusi, Anna Fiamora, Amanda Jaros, Nichole Galicia, Stephanie Nur, Noah Le Gros, and Martin Sensmeier in...
- 2/27/2022
- by TVSeriesFinale.com
- TVSeriesFinale.com
All season long, 1883 hasn’t wavered from one of its biggest themes: The Oregon Trail is harsh and unforgiving, and it doesn’t care who kicks the bucket along its rutted path.
But plucky heroine Elsa Dutton is going to beat the odds, heal from a nasty arrow wound to her liver and live… right? Right?!
More from TVLineDoes Live-Action Fairly OddParents Revival Capture Og Nicktoon's Tone? Watch Trailer, Get Premiere Date1883 Recap: Back Where We BeganDid Peacemaker Cameos Impress? Did Olympics Drama Drain You? Is 1883's Elsa a Quick Rebound? And More TV Qs
Ahead of the Paramount+ drama’s Season 1 finale Sunday,...
But plucky heroine Elsa Dutton is going to beat the odds, heal from a nasty arrow wound to her liver and live… right? Right?!
More from TVLineDoes Live-Action Fairly OddParents Revival Capture Og Nicktoon's Tone? Watch Trailer, Get Premiere Date1883 Recap: Back Where We BeganDid Peacemaker Cameos Impress? Did Olympics Drama Drain You? Is 1883's Elsa a Quick Rebound? And More TV Qs
Ahead of the Paramount+ drama’s Season 1 finale Sunday,...
- 2/25/2022
- by Kimberly Roots
- TVLine.com
The Dutton family's journey is continuing. Paramount+ has ordered additional episodes of the 1883 drama which launched on December 19th. The streaming service didn't call the order a second season or a renewal but, as THR notes, "adding another batch of episodes to an existing season is sometimes a contractual sleight of hand used in order to continue a series without invoking the salary bumps triggered by an additional season order."
A Western series, the 1883 TV show is a prequel to Yellowstone. It stars Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, and James Landry Hebert with Dawn Olivieri, Emma Malouff, Alex Fine, Gratiela Brancusi, Anna Fiamora, Amanda Jaros, Nichole Galicia, Stephanie Nur, Noah Le Gros, and Martin Sensmeier in recurring roles. Guest stars include Billy Bob Thornton, Graham...
A Western series, the 1883 TV show is a prequel to Yellowstone. It stars Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, and James Landry Hebert with Dawn Olivieri, Emma Malouff, Alex Fine, Gratiela Brancusi, Anna Fiamora, Amanda Jaros, Nichole Galicia, Stephanie Nur, Noah Le Gros, and Martin Sensmeier in recurring roles. Guest stars include Billy Bob Thornton, Graham...
- 2/16/2022
- by TVSeriesFinale.com
- TVSeriesFinale.com
If you're still griping about having to purchase Paramount+ to get your Dutton fix, you're not going to like this news!
Those of us who have already realized the benefit to Paramount+ can prepare to welcome another generation of Duttons into our lives.
That's right! There's big Dutton news out of the streamer.
Paramount+ today announced more of its hit series from Taylor Sheridan, 1883, is planned for the service following a record-breaking performance that shattered the service’s record as the most-watched title ever globally.
Additionally, the service has ordered 1932, the next chapter of the Yellowstone origin story.
Produced by MTV Entertainment Studios and 101 Studios, 1932 will follow a new generation of Duttons during the time of western expansion, Prohibition, and the Great Depression.
“The incredible storytelling and stellar performances behind 1883 have fueled phenomenal new records for Paramount+,” said Tanya Giles, chief programming officer, ViacomCBS Streaming.
“Promoting the series through...
Those of us who have already realized the benefit to Paramount+ can prepare to welcome another generation of Duttons into our lives.
That's right! There's big Dutton news out of the streamer.
Paramount+ today announced more of its hit series from Taylor Sheridan, 1883, is planned for the service following a record-breaking performance that shattered the service’s record as the most-watched title ever globally.
Additionally, the service has ordered 1932, the next chapter of the Yellowstone origin story.
Produced by MTV Entertainment Studios and 101 Studios, 1932 will follow a new generation of Duttons during the time of western expansion, Prohibition, and the Great Depression.
“The incredible storytelling and stellar performances behind 1883 have fueled phenomenal new records for Paramount+,” said Tanya Giles, chief programming officer, ViacomCBS Streaming.
“Promoting the series through...
- 2/15/2022
- by Carissa Pavlica
- TVfanatic
“Yellowstone” prequel “1883” has been renewed for additional episodes at Paramount Plus, and the ViacomCBS-owned streaming service has ordered another Taylor Sheridan-created origin-story show following the Dutton Family called “1932.” Yes, you guessed it — the show will follow a new generation of Duttons “during the time of western expansion, Prohibition and the Great Depression.”
“1883″ stars Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Billy Bob Thornton, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Marc Rissmann, Audie Rick, Eric Nelsen and James Landry Hébert.
The show follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of untamed America. It is a stark retelling of western expansion and an intense study of one family fleeing poverty to seek a better future in America’s promised land — Montana. It is executive produced by Sheridan, John Linson, Art Linson, David Glasser, Ron Burkle and Bob Yari.
ViacomCBS, soon to be renamed Paramount,...
“1883″ stars Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Billy Bob Thornton, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Marc Rissmann, Audie Rick, Eric Nelsen and James Landry Hébert.
The show follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of untamed America. It is a stark retelling of western expansion and an intense study of one family fleeing poverty to seek a better future in America’s promised land — Montana. It is executive produced by Sheridan, John Linson, Art Linson, David Glasser, Ron Burkle and Bob Yari.
ViacomCBS, soon to be renamed Paramount,...
- 2/15/2022
- by Jennifer Maas
- Variety Film + TV
Paramount+ announced during the ViacomCBS investor meeting on Tuesday that Taylor Sheridan’s smash hit “1883,” the prequel to his western series “Yellowstone,” has been renewed for a second season. And the Dutton family saga is getting another spinoff, “1932,” which will be set during the tumultuous era of westward expansion, Prohibition and the Great Depression.
In other Sheridan news, Billy Bob Thornton will lead the writer/producer’s new series “Land Man,” as a crisis manager for an oil company. “Land Man” is based on the Boomtown podcast and will begin production in 2023.
And Zoe Saldaña will star in Sheridan’s CIA drama “Lioness,” which she’ll executive produce with Nicole Kidman.
“The incredible storytelling and stellar performances behind ‘1883’ have fueled phenomenal new records for Paramount+,” said Tanya Giles, chief programming officer at ViacomCBS Streaming. “Promoting the series through linear sampling on the Paramount Network during their latest record-breaking...
In other Sheridan news, Billy Bob Thornton will lead the writer/producer’s new series “Land Man,” as a crisis manager for an oil company. “Land Man” is based on the Boomtown podcast and will begin production in 2023.
And Zoe Saldaña will star in Sheridan’s CIA drama “Lioness,” which she’ll executive produce with Nicole Kidman.
“The incredible storytelling and stellar performances behind ‘1883’ have fueled phenomenal new records for Paramount+,” said Tanya Giles, chief programming officer at ViacomCBS Streaming. “Promoting the series through linear sampling on the Paramount Network during their latest record-breaking...
- 2/15/2022
- by Sharon Knolle
- The Wrap
As Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone” universe expands, so does its audience. After “Yellowstone’s” Season 4 premiere in November soared to 14.7 million viewers — an impressive feat in today’s bleak linear TV landscape — “1883,” the neo-western prequel, had the biggest new series premiere on cable since 2015.
The MTV Entertainment Studios and 101 Studios production’s “sampler special” drew 4.9 million viewers on Paramount Network following a new episode of its Emmy-nominated predecessor. The first two episodes of the prequel will be broadcast on cable after “Yellowstone” on Sunday nights, but all other episodes will be exclusively on the re-branded ViacomCBS streamer.
In addition, “1883” broke ground as Paramount Plus’ most-watched original series premiere ever following its debut this past Sunday. The stark retelling of Western expansion in America’s promised land was also the No. 1 most social streaming drama series per data from Talkwalker Social Content Ratings. All in all, a happy...
The MTV Entertainment Studios and 101 Studios production’s “sampler special” drew 4.9 million viewers on Paramount Network following a new episode of its Emmy-nominated predecessor. The first two episodes of the prequel will be broadcast on cable after “Yellowstone” on Sunday nights, but all other episodes will be exclusively on the re-branded ViacomCBS streamer.
In addition, “1883” broke ground as Paramount Plus’ most-watched original series premiere ever following its debut this past Sunday. The stark retelling of Western expansion in America’s promised land was also the No. 1 most social streaming drama series per data from Talkwalker Social Content Ratings. All in all, a happy...
- 12/21/2021
- by Mónica Marie Zorrilla
- Variety Film + TV
The Sunday premiere of the Yellowstone prequel, 1883, set a new record as Paramount+ most watched original series premiere, more than doubling the previous viewership record across the service’s owned and operated platforms, with additional third party reporting still to come, the ViacomCBS streaming platform said without providing any ratings data.
Supporting the company’s claim for 1883‘s big debut on Paramount+ over the first 24 hours of release is the delivery of the premiere’s airing behind Yellowstone on Paramount Network. The promotional linear telecast drew strong 4.9 million total viewers in Live+Same Day, according to Nielsen, making it the biggest new series premiere on cable since 2015.
1883, created and executive produced by Yellowstone co-creator/EP Taylor Sheridan, held onto impressive 65% of its big Yellowstone lead-in (7.5 million).
For comparison, another new...
Supporting the company’s claim for 1883‘s big debut on Paramount+ over the first 24 hours of release is the delivery of the premiere’s airing behind Yellowstone on Paramount Network. The promotional linear telecast drew strong 4.9 million total viewers in Live+Same Day, according to Nielsen, making it the biggest new series premiere on cable since 2015.
1883, created and executive produced by Yellowstone co-creator/EP Taylor Sheridan, held onto impressive 65% of its big Yellowstone lead-in (7.5 million).
For comparison, another new...
- 12/21/2021
- by Nellie Andreeva
- Deadline Film + TV
[Warning: The below contains Major spoilers for the first two episodes of 1883, “1883” and “Behind Us, A Cliff.”] “The road west is filled with failures, but failure isn’t what drove him. It was a dream. And the dream was coming true,” Elsa (Isabel May) says of her father, James (Tim McGraw) in Taylor Sheridan’s new drama. On Yellowstone, we’ve seen how successful the Duttons are in Montana. Now, on 1883, we’ll see their journey, with the family of John’s (Kevin Costner) great-grandfather James, his wife Margaret (Faith Hill), Elsa, and their son John (Audie Rick). But as the first two episodes show, it’s not going to be easy. The guide for this journey is Shea (Sam Elliott), whom we meet after he loses his family to small pox and holds a gun under his chin. His right-hand man, Thomas (Lamonica Garrett), lets him decide his next move before the two set out, first seeing James as ...
- 12/19/2021
- TV Insider
Vulture Watch
Will this prequel series be as successful as Yellowstone?. Has the 1883 TV show been cancelled or renewed for a second season on Paramount+? The television vulture is watching all the latest cancellation and renewal news, so this page is the place to track the status of 1883, season two. Bookmark it, or subscribe for the latest updates. Remember, the television vulture is watching your shows. Are you?
What's This TV Show About?
Streaming on the Paramount+ subscription service, the 1883 TV show is a prequel to Yellowstone. It stars Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, and James Landry Hebert with Dawn Olivieri, Emma Malouff, Alex Fine, Gratiela Brancusi, Anna Fiamora, Amanda Jaros, Nichole Galicia, Stephanie Nur, Noah Le Gros, and Martin Sensmeier in recurring roles. Guest stars include Billy...
Will this prequel series be as successful as Yellowstone?. Has the 1883 TV show been cancelled or renewed for a second season on Paramount+? The television vulture is watching all the latest cancellation and renewal news, so this page is the place to track the status of 1883, season two. Bookmark it, or subscribe for the latest updates. Remember, the television vulture is watching your shows. Are you?
What's This TV Show About?
Streaming on the Paramount+ subscription service, the 1883 TV show is a prequel to Yellowstone. It stars Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, and James Landry Hebert with Dawn Olivieri, Emma Malouff, Alex Fine, Gratiela Brancusi, Anna Fiamora, Amanda Jaros, Nichole Galicia, Stephanie Nur, Noah Le Gros, and Martin Sensmeier in recurring roles. Guest stars include Billy...
- 12/19/2021
- by TVSeriesFinale.com
- TVSeriesFinale.com
Network: Paramount+
Episodes: Ongoing (hour)
Seasons: Ongoing
TV show dates: December 19, 2021 -- present
Series status: Has not been cancelled
Performers include: Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, and James Landry Hebert with Dawn Olivieri, Emma Malouff, Alex Fine, Gratiela Brancusi, Anna Fiamora, Amanda Jaros, Nichole Galicia, Stephanie Nur, Noah Le Gros, and Martin Sensmeier in recurring roles.
TV show description:
A Western series, the 1883 TV show is a prequel to Yellowstone and was created by one of that show's creators, Taylor Sheridan.
Read More…...
Episodes: Ongoing (hour)
Seasons: Ongoing
TV show dates: December 19, 2021 -- present
Series status: Has not been cancelled
Performers include: Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, and James Landry Hebert with Dawn Olivieri, Emma Malouff, Alex Fine, Gratiela Brancusi, Anna Fiamora, Amanda Jaros, Nichole Galicia, Stephanie Nur, Noah Le Gros, and Martin Sensmeier in recurring roles.
TV show description:
A Western series, the 1883 TV show is a prequel to Yellowstone and was created by one of that show's creators, Taylor Sheridan.
Read More…...
- 12/19/2021
- by TVSeriesFinale.com
- TVSeriesFinale.com
In an age of television where nothing is more attractive to networks than established I.P., it’s not enough to build a solidly performing drama on a humble plot of land. It’s all about the hydra-headed franchise these days, with even a series like “Law & Order” clawing back its territory following a decade of austerity measures. So it was only a matter of time before “Yellowstone,” Paramount Network’s superlatively popular nouveau Western, began manifest destiny.
The first such expansion comes in the form of “1883,” a far-flung prequel series focused on the forebears of John Dutton (Kevin Costner), the beleaguered cattle rancher at the center of “Yellowstone.” Decades before defending their massive Montana ranch from rapacious developers, they were settlers hoping for just enough luck and fortitude to survive the long journey west. The titular time period means hot-streak creator Taylor Sheridan going from a neo-Western to a proto-Western,...
The first such expansion comes in the form of “1883,” a far-flung prequel series focused on the forebears of John Dutton (Kevin Costner), the beleaguered cattle rancher at the center of “Yellowstone.” Decades before defending their massive Montana ranch from rapacious developers, they were settlers hoping for just enough luck and fortitude to survive the long journey west. The titular time period means hot-streak creator Taylor Sheridan going from a neo-Western to a proto-Western,...
- 12/19/2021
- by Joshua Alston
- Variety Film + TV
Before premiering the first two episodes of his Yellowstone origin story 1883 last Saturday at Wynn Las Vegas, Taylor Sheridan described the pace of Westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, at least when ViacomCBS’ just-launched streaming service Paramount+ dictates the timing.
“I was going off to do Mayor of Kingstown, but I had written the pilot episode of 1883,” Sheridan said. “The studio read it April 12, and I was flying out May 2 to go film another TV show in another country. [ViacomCBS exec] Keyes [Hill-Edgar] calls and says, ‘We can hang our hat on this, launch our streaming service with it.’ I say, ‘That’s great.’ He says, ‘We need it this year.’ I said ‘Keyes, that’s not possible, I can start production in February, maybe.’ He said, ‘No Taylor, we need it to air this year.’ ”
When Sheridan indelicately told him this would be impossible, the exec responded: “Look, we are betting the house on this, and we are trucked if you don’t do it. We’re paying you a lot of trucking money, so you trucking figure it out!’ Sheridan continued: “It was impossible to have something air in seven months that wasn’t cast, with no locations, and no other scripts. I said this first episode I’ve written is the best thing I’ve ever written. If I can’t have the time to make it right, I need everything else. I need the toys, I need the cast, I need the team. You will need to trust me, and it’s going to hurt. And I did not hear the word no, at all,” Sheridan told the crowd, adding he hadn’t slept in seven months.
Welcome to Taylor Sheridan’s universe, a place different from any other in the Hollywood landscape. For one thing, like the highly rated Yellowstone, and the Jeremy Renner series Mayor of Kingstown, and the Sylvester Stallone-starrer Kansas City that will shoot in March, and several others that will have stars like Billy Bob Thornton in them, the pilot and every word of 1883’s first season come directly from Sheridan’s laptop. On a recent day while shooting at the 6666 Ranch in Guthrie, Texas — they call it the Four Sixes — Sheridan has two units working at the same time. On horseback, he darts in and out to oversee both shoots. When he returns, he and 101 Studios CEO and 1883 executive producer David Glasser take time to meet with a couple of bankers who are drawing up the paperwork on a $325 million deal to buy that storied 266,000-acre ranch that has raised cattle and bred prized horses since the 1800s. There, Sheridan will base many of his future wide-open-spaced series creations going forward. The ranch has a thriving livestock operation, and Sheridan will also be president of the ranch. He was raised on a family farm in Bosque County until his parents’ divorce led them to sell the ranch and force Sheridan along a different path. “That ranch I grew up on was a casualty of the divorce and a traumatic adult event that turned out to be a good casualty because had they not sold it, I would have never left and I’d be the most entertaining deputy sheriff in Bosque County.”
Now, he’s got both jobs, and said the ability to work on that cowboy stuff most days keeps him sane as he works just as hard to live up to the massive five-year deal he signed with ViacomCBS to create premium programming for Paramount+. Sheridan’s buying the ranch with 101 Studios, Ron Burkle and Dan Schryer, and the deal should be final by January. They’ll build production facilities, but keep the surroundings pristine.
The first episode of 1883 debuts Sunday on the Paramount Network after Yellowstone, as the first two can be viewed at the same time on Paramount+. The second episode is again viewable next week on the Paramount Network, before the series moves permanently to the streaming service. Given the big flyover-state following of Sheridan’s Yellowstone, the challenge will be to sell that crowd on ponying up. The drama has a cast topped by Tim McGraw, Faith Hill and Sam Elliott. But the real reason Sheridan was able to make the pressurized deadline set by ViacomCBS came from a chance meeting with an actress you’ve never heard of, but one Sheridan is convinced will be a big star.
“I had kicked around this 1883 idea for three or four years and I had not found the hook, and they were extremely patient with me at Paramount,” Sheridan told me one morning after picking me up in his black pickup, the Bosque Ranch logo emblazoned on the doors. Sheridan looks a guy you’d want backing you up in a barfight. Weathered and wiry, cowboy hat atop his head and clad in what looks like a leather jacket. I climb in and nearly step on Frisco, his affable Border Collie pup and constant companion who curls up in my lap for the ride to the 6666 Ranch. Sheridan’s training Frisco to help herd cattle and said the dog is a quick study.
Anyway, Sheridan said he was “reading actors for the role of Iris in Mayor Of Kingstown, [Emma Laird got that lead role], and I read Isabel May. What made her wrong for Iris made her, I felt, the personification of this world of 1883.”
As Elsa Dutton, May was to Sheridan an opportunity to inject a pure-of-heart narrator with a sheen of innocence, and as a character she is reminiscent of Madeleine Stowe’s Last of the Mohicans, in that she found herself surprisingly exhilarated and unafraid after crossing from civilized society to the dangers and struggles of the untamed frontier. Trouble was, Sheridan couldn’t really tell the actress, or even the studio, exactly where this was going as it took shape in his head. He just needed to make sure May did not sign on to another series before he figured it out, in a moment when pilots were casting up. May had starred for two seasons in the Netflix show Alexa & Katie and did nine episodes of Young Sheldon. Surely, she’d be gone by the time Sheridan finished writing the 10 scripts for 1883‘s first season.
Sheridan said after May left the room, he was reminded of the time he supplemented a struggling actor’s salary teaching acting, and a young Jennifer Lawrence paid her money and signed up with him. Sheridan spent only a little time with her, he told me, before returning her money and telling her there wasn’t anything he could teach her. She had everything she needed already. His only advice: don’t let anyone in Hollywood try to change you. He saw similar things in May.
“I saw she could represent innocence and hope, and I called Paramount and said, ‘I got good news, and then, I got some you need to trust me news.’ At this point I had not figured out how to tell this story and I had Sam Elliott over here and I had Tim McGraw here and Faith Hill and I had not found the bridge between them all. When I met Isabel, the whole story, all 10 episodes, went right through my head. I called Paramount and said, ‘I’m going to sit down and start writing. You’ll have the first episode in about three weeks, but I need to hire the lead, the female lead, who’s a complete unknown, right now, before I start writing. Because it won’t work if we don’t get her, and she goes and does another job.’
“So, to their credit, we made a deal with Isabel after I called her manager and said, ‘I got good news and bad news. Bad news is she’s not getting Kingstown. The good news is she’s going to be the star of this thing with me.’ She said, ‘What is it?’ I said, ‘Well, give me three weeks, but make the deal now. Please trust me.’ And she did the deal. I spoke with Isabel and said, ‘You’re going to do this. You don’t know what it is yet but trust me, you’ll be great. Please say yes.’ She said yes and I sat down and wrote it.”
I asked May about the unusual turn of events.
“Oh, we’re going there, are we?” she said, with a smile that will become familiar to the world at large as the wagon train begins the trek from Texas to Montana this Sunday and that smile lights up the screen. “I tested for a role in the Mayor of Kingstown and I was not right for it, and he knew that, and I knew that,” May said. “Then, he wrote me a lovely little letter and said he would find something for me, and I thought, oh, okay, five years from now. And then, two weeks later, I got a phone call and he said, I haven’t written it yet but you’re Elsa and I want you to be Elsa, do you want to be Elsa? I said, of course I want to be Elsa. Then he outlined what it would entail and what story he wanted to tell, and yeah, I just was swept away.”
One of May’s favorite movies is Frances, and she found herself hoping to one day to play a role in which an actress could play the depths of character Jessica Lange as the tragic actress Frances Farmer. She just didn’t expect it to happen coming right out of her teens.
“It’s one of my favorite performances of all time,” she said. “A character study where you’re taken on a journey and that was the first film that I thought of when I read this,” she said. “It is so rare for a young actor, actress in particular, to have this opportunity and it’s quite emotional to think about because…sorry [she gets misty]. [Elsa] is just such a beautiful person, her soul is so beautiful. She experiences the tragedy, and heartbreak, devastation, and love, and has a full arc. There’s so much depth to her, and then, she also gets to become different people. You know, she’s not just one girl. She’s one type of girl that becomes a different type of girl that becomes a woman and becomes a different type of woman. Who gets that chance?”
It is easy to see the potential that Sheridan saw in Elliott or McGraw, who is as tough as characters as anyone on Yellowstone, and Hill as the matriarch following her husband’s dream West, but mindful of the dangers to her son and daughter. What did Sheridan see that led him to hang much of an expensive series on a relatively untested actress?
“There’s a real depth to her,” he said. “She’s very young and I liked that innocence, but not naivete. She’s not blind to the world. Some people, there’s a certain goodness that permeates from them and she has that. Tom Hanks has that. When you see him in the movie you feel like, that’s a really good man, and if you’re lucky enough to meet him, you’ll realize, he is a really good man. She has that same quality and I felt like telling the story from the perspective of a 19-year-old girl coming of age and in one of the most hellish events that a family could endure was a fascinating prospect for a storyteller.”
This kind of thing seems to happen often since Sheridan and ViacomCBS and MTV Entertainment Studios signed that five-year deal close to $200 million, to become the beachhead series creator for Paramount+. Sheridan might well have six series on the air by end of 2022 for the company, including more Yellowstone. The studio pays him millions of dollars for his scripts. Because of the rush to make this Sunday’s series launch, ViacomCBS stepped up to an 1883 budget well in excess of the one for Yellowstone, cable TV’s highest-rated show.
When I meet ViacomCBS president and CEO Bob Bakish in Vegas after the premiere, 101’s Glasser was reviewing with the topper some of the Sheridan-generated series they are planning. I joke they should be careful, they are working Sheridan like a rented mule.
“Oh, this is no rental, this is bought and we are all in on Taylor,” Bakish said. Glasser said that Sheridan wouldn’t have it any other way, especially with the ranch as his primary base. The two nights I was there, Sheridan and his team ended shooting days cooking up massive dinners in the main ranch house and feeding everyone from cowboys to crew. After, Sheridan, Glasser and co-ep and editor Michael Friedman watch dailies in an Airstream trailer right outside, and cut scenes from the day’s shoot. Sheridan will knock back a glass of scotch along the way, turn in early and wake up at the crack of dawn to get on a horse and do cowboy things. If he’s not shooting, he’ll go write. If he is shooting, he’s back by the time the cast is up and ready, early in the morning. The green light decisions are made by MTV Entertainment Studios, and Viacom Group President Chris McCarthy. But they leave Sheridan alone.
“The most challenging thing has been, I’m a musician, and I’ve seen more sunrises in the last four months than I care to see for the rest of my life,” said Tim McGraw, who plays James Dutton, the great grandfather of Kevin Costner’s John Dutton character. “I guess I’ve seen a few sunrises as a musician, but those were self-inflicted sunrises. I don’t want to see any more sunrises for a while.”
Comprised mostly of a production team that Sheridan began building when he directed Wind River, the set has an easygoing manner and a short hand. After Hill sits on horseback, repeating a scene for a long time, the radio crackles that she needs a Red Bull. Husband McGraw, who isn’t in this scene but watches intently anyway, trots over to her and delivers it, and jogs away with it after she takes a few sips. Later, when Hill walks past me and others watching, not knowing who we were, she smiles and says she is getting some stew. Would we like her to bring some for us?
Elliott, whose interplay and closeness with Lamonica Garrett as former Pinkerton Detectives who’ve committed to steering 30 wagon trains of mostly Dutch-speaking settlers across the plains resembles that of Tommy Lee Jones’ Woodrow Call and Robert Duvall’s Gus McCrae from Lonesome Dove, found a way to become even closer.
“I met Lamonica and we hit it off pretty quick,” Elliott said. “It’s one of the things I’m most enjoying about this character, is that this white guy and this Black guy are like brothers in the 1800s, and man, the stuff we’re doing is so much fun. So we’ve got these cowboy teepees, and one of them was bigger than the other, and in a couple of the earlier episodes, they’re sitting side by side. It’s where we’re supposed to stay and where we keep all our stuff. I figured, one of the teepees is plenty big for both of us. Why would we need two?”
When I suggest that getting a big teepee is a sign of having a good agent, Elliott laughs and says, “The one tent is big enough for two guys. So we’re now not only two brothers traveling together, a Black guy and a white guy, we’re both sleeping in the same tent now. Nobody but me and Lamonica even knows it, because it’s behind the scenes stuff, but it makes us feel better.”
The loyalty was evident when an actor playing the cook for the wagon train left. Sheridan called James Jordan, who has played everyone from the killer in Wind River to a Yellowstone lawman and had just finished starring with Renner as a prison guard in Mayor of Kingstown. While Jordan might have had vacation or other plans, those were scrapped and Jordan showed up the next day and could be seen yelling at the Slavic language speaking settlers not following his rules, which they have no hope of understanding no matter how loud he yells.
Shooting An Epic On Westward Expansion Is Hard
In the course of the first season, the wagon train led by James and Margaret Dutton (McGraw and Hill), and two Pinkerton agents (Elliott and Garrett) endures dangerous river crossings, wild weather swings and blinding dust storms. Cast members told me that conditions could be terribly difficult, particularly the harsh cold of Montana. They were quick to add that they would do it all over again. The common reaction is they all felt they couldn’t recall being offered scripts quite as good as the 10 that Sheridan wrote and sent them.
“Tim probably had said yes by this point, and look, I knew Taylor was an amazing writer,” Hill said. “But going in to do something with my husband…we had been asked to do this a lot, to be on screen together. This needed to be something that could not be compared to anything else, period. It’s just not something I wanted to give away. Upon reading the first couple of episodes, wow. Holy cow, is this amazing. So I said I was very interested. This sounds like it could be it. And the episodes just kept coming in, and I just had never read anything like it, to be honest. And then, the perspective from Elsa’s voice, that she carries this show and how it’s seen through her eyes and her voice. As a woman, as a mom with three daughters, I just thought, ‘My God, this is extraordinary writing for anyone, but for a young woman, it’s really extraordinary.’ And I just felt the characters were great. They were colorful. They were intense. There’s tragedy. There’s passion. There’s a little bit of humor, and Sam and Lamonica bring that in various ways. I just thought, this may be the time that we could actually do this together. I was just blown away by the writing, and by the writing for Isabel just floored me.”
So caught up in Sheridan’s prose, Hill hadn’t really considered the price she and the cast would pay to shoot it.
“I pretty much underestimated it all, if you want my honest opinion,” Hill said. “I knew that I was not afraid of hard work. I don’t think anyone here is. Tim is not. We grew up with hard working parents and that’s the only way we know. Taylor did say that this would be unlike anything we had ever done before, and that the work would be really, really hard because he’d want it to be authentic. It was hard, physically and mentally challenging, but we were trained by the best of the best, the wranglers, the stunt men and women. Guns and armory, the set, the costuming, everything just put us there in that place, in that time. So it was harder than we thought including driving that wagon, but I learned to love it. And better on the wagon than I am on a horse.”
For Garrett, the chance for a Black actor to play a starring role in an 1800s Western, and be depicted in the show’s credits, is a milestone that made him most proud.
“[My character] Thomas was a Buffalo soldier, and Shea [Elliott] was his captain,” Garrett said. “They fought the war together, they’ve been battle-tested together, and when the war ended, the Buffalo soldiers’ jobs turned into something that they didn’t sign up for. So, they became Pinkerton agents, and they’ve just been joined at the hip since then. They’ve been traveling, helping people, been protecting people. Thomas knows Shea like no one else, and Shea sees Thomas. Now, in this time period, you could walk around every day and not be seen. Just because people lay eyes on you doesn’t mean they see you. Shea was one of the first people that saw Thomas, and they just became inseparable.”
Growing up, Garrett watched some Westerns, and of course he noticed that Black characters were barely seen.
“I get emotional about it,” he said. “My background, my parents’ background…my dad, his family, a lot of brothers and sisters, they were sharecroppers in Mississippi. My mom, she was raised by a woman who was born a slave, her grandmother, and it’s significant. The opening credits of a show weren’t usually there for Black actors. Raymond St. Jacques was the first, in the last season of Rawhide when there a sketch of his face, and Otis Young was one of the first to have his name in the opening credits of The Outcasts. There was Danny Glover, though they didn’t have the faces in the opening of Lonesome Dove. So, having my name and your face in the beginning as one of the stars of a Western, in that tintype, black and white, old…I saw that at the theater a couple weeks ago in Amarillo. They showed it for the cast and crew, and at first, I didn’t want to go because I didn’t want to see things that might get in my head or affect my performance. But as I saw it, and my face popped up…I haven’t cried that much since my friend’s funeral, four years ago. It affected me. I don’t know where it came from. Knowing the history of it, and doing my research, and just knowing what I saw and what I didn’t see growing up, it all came to that moment right there on that screen.”
The Western he most admired was Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, also a favorite of Sheridan’s.
“There’s a line I have quoted all the time for the last 20 years,” Garrett said. “It’s at the end of the movie when Clint Eastwood’s William Munny is about to shoot Gene Hackman’s Little Bill in Greeley’s Tavern, and when Bill says he doesn’t deserve this, Munny says, ‘Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.’ And Bill says, ‘I’ll see you in hell, William Munny.’ There’s a moment in this season where, when we got to it, Taylor came over and said, ‘Let’s meat this up some more. Before you shoot him…Taylor gave me this little thick monologue. It didn’t hit me until we were done shooting and I got in bed that night. I called my wife and said, ‘I had my William Munny moment!’ ”
Elliott seems as natural for a period Western as a saddle on a horse. He said he felt he’d done enough Westerns to be typecast, and has turned down many offers until Sheridan called and sent him the 1883 script. As he read the first pages describing a tragedy in the life of his character Shea Brennan, Elliott was hooked immediately.
“I don’t know that I ever thought about a legacy for myself, so to speak,” Elliott said. “I just thought about how fortunate I was to do what I wanted to do when I was 9 years old, because of my Western heritage and my family’s for several generations, they were all Texans, and most all of them from West Texas. I think that the Western genre automatically spoke out to me on some level.
“It’s strange to me how parts in Western films have come around to me and continue to,” Elliott said. “I was working for John Milius on a show called Rough Riders and I got a call from my agent and they said hey, there’s this thing coming to you from the Coen Brothers and I was so excited…because I’d been doing a series of these Western things and there was a moment in time where I really believed I was never going to get out of this genre, that people weren’t going to see me away from this. So, I get this script and I’m so excited about it because I think I’m going to play some wacky character in some Coen Brothers movie called The Big Lebowski. I start reading it and I start looking at the character script and I said, ‘What the f*ck, it’s another cowboy!’ This one’s a drugstore cowboy, but still, it’s a cowboy. The film wasn’t a Western, but the guy is a cowboy. Sitting at the bar with a cowboy hat on. Dressed like a cowboy. Talking like a cowboy. Down through the ages. Through the sands of time. You got to be careful, I guess, how many Westerns you do or they’re going to think that’s all you can do.”
Why did he return and put back on the cowboy hat?
“Taylor’s script,” he said. “I knew his work as an actor, and because of his films. Sicario, for starters. The thing he did with Jeff [Bridges in Hell or High Water] blew me away. The guy writes brilliant stuff. He’s not a bad director either, but I love his dialogue. I love that it’s spare and he doesn’t waste a lot of words. That speaks to me. At the same time, it’s intelligent, insightful. It’s all those things that an actor would love to do and it’s always fun to see yourself in some role that’s more interesting than you are personally. That is such a gift.”
Perhaps the most complex character is McGraw’s James Dutton, the connective tissue between 1883 and Costner’s Yellowstone character John Dutton. James Dutton is a farmer, but the first time we see him, he’s racing his wagon away from a band of horse thieves. By the time the dust settles, he’s killed every last man. We learn in flashback that he was a Confederate officer with a bad case of Ptsd – in a scene he shares with Tom Hanks. James Dutton has seen enough of Texas and his only concern is bringing his wary wife, daughter and son far West for a new life with the promise of solitude. He is part of a wagon train only because he becomes persuaded there is safety in numbers.
McGraw has shown a screen presence in films like Friday Night Lights and The Blind Side, but his priority has long been singing and touring as one of C&w music’s top performers. 1883 is by far the biggest challenge he has faced onscreen, and McGraw threw himself into it. Like everything in the Taylor Sheridan Universe, it started with the phone call from Sheridan.
“I always thought I’d love to do a Western, if something good ever came along,” he said. “The way it worked with Taylor was, my agent said Taylor wants your number. Yes, give it to him. He asked if I was a fan of Yellowstone, and I said of course I was. He asked if I would like to be on the show. I told him I’d love to do it, but I didn’t want to just be some sort of singing cowboy that comes on and gets taken to the train station or something like that. He goes, well, I might have an idea. Give me a week or so. And then, he called me back, and he told me the idea that he had, to do a flashback scene with me as the original Dutton who founded the Yellowstone Ranch. And I thought, now, that’s interesting. I really like that. And that is how the whole ball started rolling.”
McGraw said at that point, Sheridan never mentioned the possibility his character would anchor a spinoff series.
“I didn’t know if he knew then or not, but he didn’t tell me he knew that,” McGraw said. “But knowing Taylor, I’m sure he had that idea cooking in the back of his head. So we shot the flashback scenes, and a couple months later, I got a call from him. He says, you know, dude, I just showed these scenes to the studio, and they want to do a prequel of all of this, if you’re interested in it. I’m like, well, yeah, I’m interested. And then he started sending the scripts, and I was just blown away. This is one of the best things I’d ever read. Faith and I, we both kind of became obsessed with them. And then Sam got involved.”
The decision came down to what he and Hill wanted to do with the next chapter of their lives. They are now empty nesters, their three daughters off on their own. They could certainly continue on their comfortable musical track of recording and touring. But those scripts…
“We knew we were in for a lot, that this was going to be a huge production with a lot of work, that it was going to take a lot of people to pull it off, and it was going to take a lot of elbow grease,” McGraw said. “I remember, we had the contracts on our porch, and we were sitting there looking at them. I told Faith, first off, when we sign these contracts, we are not the boss anymore. And then secondly, we’re either going to be burning hot or freezing cold, and there’s never going to be any in-between. That’s the way this shoot’s going to go, and it’s going to be a lot of hard work. Of course, she’s a hard worker, so she was ready for it, and we’d fallen in love with the scripts so much. But we did think about the logistics and how hard it was going to be to get everything done in the time frame they were shooting for.”
As for the expansion of the Dutton mythology, McGraw said he and Costner have not compared notes. “When I was on set doing Yellowstone, we texted back and forth a few times but never got the chance to hang out. So I don’t really know Kevin, but I feel like I know John Dutton from watching Yellowstone so much,” he said. “I think the show will stand on its own and you’ll love it if you watch Yellowstone or you will go and watch Yellowstone to see the continuation of the story. But here you’ll see the gene pool of the Dutton family and the correlation between the original family to the modern Yellowstone Dutton family. You’ll see where the toughness, the stubbornness, the dedication to family comes from.”
McGraw respected that his character carries physical and existential war wounds and a stint in a Union prison camp that almost killed him.
“One of the things that drew me to James’ character is he’s such a complex guy, and there’s so much going on in his head, and so much in his backstory,” he said. “And the arc of his character; he starts out caring only about his family, but grows to care about these people he’s leading. He may not show it, but you can see it in his actions and the things that he does. His Ptsd is certainly there, and that’s part of what I put on him right away, from his time in the Civil War. In my mind, I don’t think he wanted to be a part of that war anyway, and didn’t believe in it. And then the South after the war and Reconstruction and the terrible mess that was made, I think that he just wanted to get out of there, and take his family to an untainted place. I think he is trying to escape his ghosts. I don’t know that he ever clearly escapes them but hopefully, he finds peace down the road. But I think that it’s something that’s always there in him, and it’s something that drives him, that and the love of his family.”
What’s Next In The Sheridan Series Universe
“I don’t know how to make a TV show,” Sheridan told me at one point, at least not the way that other prolific show creators like Chuck Lorre, Shonda Rhimes, Ryan Murphy and Greg Berlanti do it, which involves a lot of delegation and trust. “I don’t have any idea and don’t really care to learn. I don’t do pattern budgeting, or write act breaks into things. I write 10-hour movies, and go shoot them. I don’t have a writers room, I’ve written them all myself. It’s not for lack of effort, I’ve tried three times.”
Why hadn’t it worked?
“Maybe this is coming from a bit of a place of ignorance because I’ve never been in a writers room, but there are certain tropes and structures that TV shows have relied on for a really, really long time,” he said. “Certain buttons and A stories and B stories that you can drop them into any show, I don’t do that,” he said. “So, for someone who’s an experienced staff writer to come along and attempt to figure out this bizarre stream-of-consciousness writing I do, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to them. I don’t do outlines. I’ve just sat down and written all the episodes before we started filming. That way everybody knows what we’re doing, all the way through.”
Sheridan to this point has been so hands on that he will work solely on one season of a series at a time, take a couple weeks off and then face the next 10-episode season deadline. Ideas and creative solutions come to him often while he is on horseback, doing what to him is the meditative ranch work that Yellowstone’s John Dutton not coincidentally has taken up this season since recovering from near-fatal gunshot wounds.
Sheridan’s strategy was somewhat inspired by that memorable first season of True Detective that starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, and had the authorship of director Cary Joji Fukunaga and creator Nic Pizzolatto doing all the episodes. The result was game-changing for actors and filmmakers, who saw the limitations of two-hour movie run times eliminated, with characters able to reveal themselves slowly.
“What Cary did, I am doing,” Sheridan said. “Write 10-hour movies and go shoot them. I’ve been working with the same crew since Wind River and we have such a shorthand. It’s still challenging, because everything I shoot takes place outside for the most part and we’re beholden to the weather and have to force our way through. But at the end of the day, to go to some of these locations where most people have never been, where you’re opening up a new world, and all of these places or characters in the story, to me, it’s fascinating.
“Because it is so hard, physically, on the actors, on the crew, I feel like the shots look earned. And because Paramount trusts me and gives me the time to go shoot 10 to 14 days for a television episode, we can treat it like a movie, and it looks like a movie. We can take the time to rehearse it and light it and build these set pieces. And if I call them and say, I need two helicopters in one day, they just go, all right.”
Sheridan, who only stopped directing every Yellowstone episode because he was obligated to direct the Angelina Jolie film Those Who Wish Me Dead, has by necessity begun to loosen his grip a bit.
Over the last five years Glasser has spent most of his time in Sheridan’s orbit after exiting The Weinstein Company to form 101 Studios, staking $20 million to keep the then modestly rated Yellowstone going. 101 cohort David Hutkin runs the rest of the business in Hollywood, and they handle things like marketing and other tasks to simplify Sheridan’s life. Glasser said that when Sheridan refers to a writers room, he knows they’re necessary, but that doesn’t mean he has to spend his days in one because his gift is creating shows and writing scripts. Before, the process was Sheridan kicking round ideas for his Yellowstone castmember Hugh Dillon for Mayor of Kingstown, and EP Antoine Fuqua. Now that Sheridan has become a mini industry, 101 is surrounding Sheridan with experienced writer-producers to run the shows with him and who know what they’re doing.
The Sopranos and The Wolf of Wall Street’s Terence Winter signed on to shepherd Kansas City, for which Sheridan wrote the pilot. In his first major series role, Stallone plays a loyal mobster in New York who thinks that finally he’ll become a boss and put in control of a major territory. They give him Kansas City. In a fish-out-of water-drama that has the violence and humor of Goodfellas, Stallone’s mob boss has to figure out how to navigate and control a city filled with legalized marijuana shops, designer coffeehouses, hipsters and skinny jeans.
The series, and Stallone’s commitment, came together as most things do in Sheridan’s world. Quickly.
Said Glasser: “On Kansas City, I call Taylor on a Friday, and I say to him, we love Stallone and we’re both looking for something for him, why don’t we do something in the mob space? I’ve always wanted to make Mario Puzo’s Omerta, and I said, Taylor what if you came up with the cool wildness of Goodfellas with Stallone. He takes a breath, I’m not even joking, and he goes hmm, that’s a good idea, Glasser. Then, on the spot, he proceeds to spend 45 minutes pitching me a story that he just created in his head. This is Friday at 3 p.m. It is a great story, and nothing is written down. By Sunday afternoon, he handed me the pilot. I couldn’t believe it. I call the network, I say, ‘I have another show that Taylor just finished.’ They go, ‘What do you mean?’ Meanwhile, Taylor calls Sly that Sunday and he says, I have this idea. I’m going to write it. What do you think? He pitched it to him and Sly said yes on the phone. By the time we got to the network on Monday, we had a script and Stallone attached.
“This is how it happens with him,” Glasser said. “He just picks up the phone and calls people like Billy Bob Thornton, Tom Hanks, Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw and says, hey, I’ve got this idea. I call to do the deal with the agent afterwards.”
Another drama series on the front burner is Bass Reeves, and Sheridan has secured as showrunner Pat Charles, whose writing-producing work includes the CW series Black Lightning, Iron Fist and Bones. Charles is writing that pilot and will run the show with Sheridan. They are zeroing in on a star they wouldn’t name to play the title character, who was considered the greatest Black lawman who lived in the 1800s.
Also in the near term is Lioness, a fact-based drama about a U.S. undercover female operative program in which a pair of operatives are sent to infiltrate various nefarious cells involving everything from drug cartels to the war in Afghanistan. Sheridan wrote the first two episodes and they are zeroing in on cast he would not name. Tom Brady (Hell on Wheels and NOS4A2) will be the showrunner with Sheridan.
Finally, there is Landman, a drama inspired by the Texas Monthly and Imperative Entertainment podcast “Boomtown,” about the oil boom in the Permian Basin in West Texas. Sheridan will write at least the pilot for a drama full of roughnecks and wildcatters.
There is also the fifth season of Yellowstone to begin production in May, and second seasons of Mayor of Kingstown and 1883, 10 episodes each. In the current season of Yellowstone, Sheridan has been teasing the prospect of a Texas-set spinoff series to take place on the 6666 Ranch they’re purchasing, but he said that one hasn’t quite taken shape yet. Future seasons of 1883 will likely evolve into the development of the Duttons through the years, rather than being an endless wagon train ride.
Why Sheridan Is A Man On Fire
Much of Sheridan’s motivation came from the hard lessons he learned coming up, and that includes acting and screenwriting. For instance, he doesn’t have time to write movies right now, but you won’t likely find him doing that for films he doesn’t direct, after the disappointment he felt with the Tom Clancy adaptation Without Remorse. As for his prolific pace as a writer and storyteller, the words started pouring out of him when he saw the writing on the wall for his acting career. He’d been trying out for and playing parts for years — he first became aware of Yellowstone stalwart Cole Hauser after Sheridan auditioned for the Wooderson character in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused that launched the career of Matthew McConaughey — but Sheridan’s comeuppance came while playing his highest-profile role to that moment, the sheriff in the lawless hometown of Sons of Anarchy. Any illusions he had about his worth were shattered when it was time to negotiate an extension.
“I’ve always said Hollywood will tell you what you’re supposed to be doing, if you will listen,” he said. “At that time, they were offering me what I thought was a very unfair wage. It was less than virtually every other person on the show, and not enough for me to quit my second job. So, the business affairs attorney, who I won’t name, here’s what he told my attorney who said, look, there’s kids on the Cartoon Network making more than you’re offering this guy.
“The guy goes, ‘I know and you’re right that he probably deserves to make more, but we’re not going to pay him more because guess what, he’s not worth more,’ ” Sheridan recalled. “‘That’s what he’s worth. There’s 50 of him. He is 11 on the call sheet. That’s what that guy is, and that’s all he’s ever going to be.’ And that’s really when I quit. It wasn’t so much over money. It was so much more that that’s how the business saw me. It wasn’t just this jerk business affairs attorney who simply articulated what obviously was said in a room with a bunch of executives when they decided ‘Nope, we’re going to save a dollar here. He’s easy to replace because he’s just not that good at his job. Let’s replace him with someone cheaper.’ And I decided right there that I didn’t want to be 11 on the call sheet for the rest of my life. Now, I am happily 11 on the call sheet on Yellowstone, but I don’t think anybody wants to watch me do anything on television for an hour because the business told me they don’t. They told me I’m supposed to story tell behind the camera. And so, the only reason I am in front of the camera playing [the horse trainer] Travis is because I grew up on a ranch, riding horses. There’s just not another actor out there who can do those things on a horse.”
Influenced by writers ranging from Toni Morrison to Hemingway, Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry and from reading a lot of American history when it got too hot to be outside on that Texas ranch he grew up on, Sheridan hunkered down and began writing. Those writers were the inspiration, and the guard rail was all the bad, cliché-ridden scripts he routinely read for auditions. He had Mayor of Kingstown kicking around his head for a decade, but the first script he finished and sold was Sicario, which in the hands of Denis Villenueve became a harrowing cartel thriller. In quick succession, the scripts finished included Hell or High Water, the Sicario sequel Soldado and then Wind River, the latter of which gave him his directing debut.
His current station is much better than 11 on a call sheet. Paramount+ is showing a voracious appetite to order up as many series as he can create, for a streaming service whose subscriber potential rests on his broad shoulders. And when he cold calls and then sends his scripts to Kevin Costner, Jeremy Renner, Sylvester Stallone, Tom Hanks, Billy Bob Thornton, Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, more often than not they respond to his writing by starring or guest starring in his work. Sheridan acknowledges that he is in a sweet spot right now, but past tough times keep him from taking it for granted. There is no telling when people might get tired of what he’s writing, he said. So for now, he’s determined to make the absolute most of it.
“I was going off to do Mayor of Kingstown, but I had written the pilot episode of 1883,” Sheridan said. “The studio read it April 12, and I was flying out May 2 to go film another TV show in another country. [ViacomCBS exec] Keyes [Hill-Edgar] calls and says, ‘We can hang our hat on this, launch our streaming service with it.’ I say, ‘That’s great.’ He says, ‘We need it this year.’ I said ‘Keyes, that’s not possible, I can start production in February, maybe.’ He said, ‘No Taylor, we need it to air this year.’ ”
When Sheridan indelicately told him this would be impossible, the exec responded: “Look, we are betting the house on this, and we are trucked if you don’t do it. We’re paying you a lot of trucking money, so you trucking figure it out!’ Sheridan continued: “It was impossible to have something air in seven months that wasn’t cast, with no locations, and no other scripts. I said this first episode I’ve written is the best thing I’ve ever written. If I can’t have the time to make it right, I need everything else. I need the toys, I need the cast, I need the team. You will need to trust me, and it’s going to hurt. And I did not hear the word no, at all,” Sheridan told the crowd, adding he hadn’t slept in seven months.
Welcome to Taylor Sheridan’s universe, a place different from any other in the Hollywood landscape. For one thing, like the highly rated Yellowstone, and the Jeremy Renner series Mayor of Kingstown, and the Sylvester Stallone-starrer Kansas City that will shoot in March, and several others that will have stars like Billy Bob Thornton in them, the pilot and every word of 1883’s first season come directly from Sheridan’s laptop. On a recent day while shooting at the 6666 Ranch in Guthrie, Texas — they call it the Four Sixes — Sheridan has two units working at the same time. On horseback, he darts in and out to oversee both shoots. When he returns, he and 101 Studios CEO and 1883 executive producer David Glasser take time to meet with a couple of bankers who are drawing up the paperwork on a $325 million deal to buy that storied 266,000-acre ranch that has raised cattle and bred prized horses since the 1800s. There, Sheridan will base many of his future wide-open-spaced series creations going forward. The ranch has a thriving livestock operation, and Sheridan will also be president of the ranch. He was raised on a family farm in Bosque County until his parents’ divorce led them to sell the ranch and force Sheridan along a different path. “That ranch I grew up on was a casualty of the divorce and a traumatic adult event that turned out to be a good casualty because had they not sold it, I would have never left and I’d be the most entertaining deputy sheriff in Bosque County.”
Now, he’s got both jobs, and said the ability to work on that cowboy stuff most days keeps him sane as he works just as hard to live up to the massive five-year deal he signed with ViacomCBS to create premium programming for Paramount+. Sheridan’s buying the ranch with 101 Studios, Ron Burkle and Dan Schryer, and the deal should be final by January. They’ll build production facilities, but keep the surroundings pristine.
The first episode of 1883 debuts Sunday on the Paramount Network after Yellowstone, as the first two can be viewed at the same time on Paramount+. The second episode is again viewable next week on the Paramount Network, before the series moves permanently to the streaming service. Given the big flyover-state following of Sheridan’s Yellowstone, the challenge will be to sell that crowd on ponying up. The drama has a cast topped by Tim McGraw, Faith Hill and Sam Elliott. But the real reason Sheridan was able to make the pressurized deadline set by ViacomCBS came from a chance meeting with an actress you’ve never heard of, but one Sheridan is convinced will be a big star.
“I had kicked around this 1883 idea for three or four years and I had not found the hook, and they were extremely patient with me at Paramount,” Sheridan told me one morning after picking me up in his black pickup, the Bosque Ranch logo emblazoned on the doors. Sheridan looks a guy you’d want backing you up in a barfight. Weathered and wiry, cowboy hat atop his head and clad in what looks like a leather jacket. I climb in and nearly step on Frisco, his affable Border Collie pup and constant companion who curls up in my lap for the ride to the 6666 Ranch. Sheridan’s training Frisco to help herd cattle and said the dog is a quick study.
Anyway, Sheridan said he was “reading actors for the role of Iris in Mayor Of Kingstown, [Emma Laird got that lead role], and I read Isabel May. What made her wrong for Iris made her, I felt, the personification of this world of 1883.”
As Elsa Dutton, May was to Sheridan an opportunity to inject a pure-of-heart narrator with a sheen of innocence, and as a character she is reminiscent of Madeleine Stowe’s Last of the Mohicans, in that she found herself surprisingly exhilarated and unafraid after crossing from civilized society to the dangers and struggles of the untamed frontier. Trouble was, Sheridan couldn’t really tell the actress, or even the studio, exactly where this was going as it took shape in his head. He just needed to make sure May did not sign on to another series before he figured it out, in a moment when pilots were casting up. May had starred for two seasons in the Netflix show Alexa & Katie and did nine episodes of Young Sheldon. Surely, she’d be gone by the time Sheridan finished writing the 10 scripts for 1883‘s first season.
Sheridan said after May left the room, he was reminded of the time he supplemented a struggling actor’s salary teaching acting, and a young Jennifer Lawrence paid her money and signed up with him. Sheridan spent only a little time with her, he told me, before returning her money and telling her there wasn’t anything he could teach her. She had everything she needed already. His only advice: don’t let anyone in Hollywood try to change you. He saw similar things in May.
“I saw she could represent innocence and hope, and I called Paramount and said, ‘I got good news, and then, I got some you need to trust me news.’ At this point I had not figured out how to tell this story and I had Sam Elliott over here and I had Tim McGraw here and Faith Hill and I had not found the bridge between them all. When I met Isabel, the whole story, all 10 episodes, went right through my head. I called Paramount and said, ‘I’m going to sit down and start writing. You’ll have the first episode in about three weeks, but I need to hire the lead, the female lead, who’s a complete unknown, right now, before I start writing. Because it won’t work if we don’t get her, and she goes and does another job.’
“So, to their credit, we made a deal with Isabel after I called her manager and said, ‘I got good news and bad news. Bad news is she’s not getting Kingstown. The good news is she’s going to be the star of this thing with me.’ She said, ‘What is it?’ I said, ‘Well, give me three weeks, but make the deal now. Please trust me.’ And she did the deal. I spoke with Isabel and said, ‘You’re going to do this. You don’t know what it is yet but trust me, you’ll be great. Please say yes.’ She said yes and I sat down and wrote it.”
I asked May about the unusual turn of events.
“Oh, we’re going there, are we?” she said, with a smile that will become familiar to the world at large as the wagon train begins the trek from Texas to Montana this Sunday and that smile lights up the screen. “I tested for a role in the Mayor of Kingstown and I was not right for it, and he knew that, and I knew that,” May said. “Then, he wrote me a lovely little letter and said he would find something for me, and I thought, oh, okay, five years from now. And then, two weeks later, I got a phone call and he said, I haven’t written it yet but you’re Elsa and I want you to be Elsa, do you want to be Elsa? I said, of course I want to be Elsa. Then he outlined what it would entail and what story he wanted to tell, and yeah, I just was swept away.”
One of May’s favorite movies is Frances, and she found herself hoping to one day to play a role in which an actress could play the depths of character Jessica Lange as the tragic actress Frances Farmer. She just didn’t expect it to happen coming right out of her teens.
“It’s one of my favorite performances of all time,” she said. “A character study where you’re taken on a journey and that was the first film that I thought of when I read this,” she said. “It is so rare for a young actor, actress in particular, to have this opportunity and it’s quite emotional to think about because…sorry [she gets misty]. [Elsa] is just such a beautiful person, her soul is so beautiful. She experiences the tragedy, and heartbreak, devastation, and love, and has a full arc. There’s so much depth to her, and then, she also gets to become different people. You know, she’s not just one girl. She’s one type of girl that becomes a different type of girl that becomes a woman and becomes a different type of woman. Who gets that chance?”
It is easy to see the potential that Sheridan saw in Elliott or McGraw, who is as tough as characters as anyone on Yellowstone, and Hill as the matriarch following her husband’s dream West, but mindful of the dangers to her son and daughter. What did Sheridan see that led him to hang much of an expensive series on a relatively untested actress?
“There’s a real depth to her,” he said. “She’s very young and I liked that innocence, but not naivete. She’s not blind to the world. Some people, there’s a certain goodness that permeates from them and she has that. Tom Hanks has that. When you see him in the movie you feel like, that’s a really good man, and if you’re lucky enough to meet him, you’ll realize, he is a really good man. She has that same quality and I felt like telling the story from the perspective of a 19-year-old girl coming of age and in one of the most hellish events that a family could endure was a fascinating prospect for a storyteller.”
This kind of thing seems to happen often since Sheridan and ViacomCBS and MTV Entertainment Studios signed that five-year deal close to $200 million, to become the beachhead series creator for Paramount+. Sheridan might well have six series on the air by end of 2022 for the company, including more Yellowstone. The studio pays him millions of dollars for his scripts. Because of the rush to make this Sunday’s series launch, ViacomCBS stepped up to an 1883 budget well in excess of the one for Yellowstone, cable TV’s highest-rated show.
When I meet ViacomCBS president and CEO Bob Bakish in Vegas after the premiere, 101’s Glasser was reviewing with the topper some of the Sheridan-generated series they are planning. I joke they should be careful, they are working Sheridan like a rented mule.
“Oh, this is no rental, this is bought and we are all in on Taylor,” Bakish said. Glasser said that Sheridan wouldn’t have it any other way, especially with the ranch as his primary base. The two nights I was there, Sheridan and his team ended shooting days cooking up massive dinners in the main ranch house and feeding everyone from cowboys to crew. After, Sheridan, Glasser and co-ep and editor Michael Friedman watch dailies in an Airstream trailer right outside, and cut scenes from the day’s shoot. Sheridan will knock back a glass of scotch along the way, turn in early and wake up at the crack of dawn to get on a horse and do cowboy things. If he’s not shooting, he’ll go write. If he is shooting, he’s back by the time the cast is up and ready, early in the morning. The green light decisions are made by MTV Entertainment Studios, and Viacom Group President Chris McCarthy. But they leave Sheridan alone.
“The most challenging thing has been, I’m a musician, and I’ve seen more sunrises in the last four months than I care to see for the rest of my life,” said Tim McGraw, who plays James Dutton, the great grandfather of Kevin Costner’s John Dutton character. “I guess I’ve seen a few sunrises as a musician, but those were self-inflicted sunrises. I don’t want to see any more sunrises for a while.”
Comprised mostly of a production team that Sheridan began building when he directed Wind River, the set has an easygoing manner and a short hand. After Hill sits on horseback, repeating a scene for a long time, the radio crackles that she needs a Red Bull. Husband McGraw, who isn’t in this scene but watches intently anyway, trots over to her and delivers it, and jogs away with it after she takes a few sips. Later, when Hill walks past me and others watching, not knowing who we were, she smiles and says she is getting some stew. Would we like her to bring some for us?
Elliott, whose interplay and closeness with Lamonica Garrett as former Pinkerton Detectives who’ve committed to steering 30 wagon trains of mostly Dutch-speaking settlers across the plains resembles that of Tommy Lee Jones’ Woodrow Call and Robert Duvall’s Gus McCrae from Lonesome Dove, found a way to become even closer.
“I met Lamonica and we hit it off pretty quick,” Elliott said. “It’s one of the things I’m most enjoying about this character, is that this white guy and this Black guy are like brothers in the 1800s, and man, the stuff we’re doing is so much fun. So we’ve got these cowboy teepees, and one of them was bigger than the other, and in a couple of the earlier episodes, they’re sitting side by side. It’s where we’re supposed to stay and where we keep all our stuff. I figured, one of the teepees is plenty big for both of us. Why would we need two?”
When I suggest that getting a big teepee is a sign of having a good agent, Elliott laughs and says, “The one tent is big enough for two guys. So we’re now not only two brothers traveling together, a Black guy and a white guy, we’re both sleeping in the same tent now. Nobody but me and Lamonica even knows it, because it’s behind the scenes stuff, but it makes us feel better.”
The loyalty was evident when an actor playing the cook for the wagon train left. Sheridan called James Jordan, who has played everyone from the killer in Wind River to a Yellowstone lawman and had just finished starring with Renner as a prison guard in Mayor of Kingstown. While Jordan might have had vacation or other plans, those were scrapped and Jordan showed up the next day and could be seen yelling at the Slavic language speaking settlers not following his rules, which they have no hope of understanding no matter how loud he yells.
Shooting An Epic On Westward Expansion Is Hard
In the course of the first season, the wagon train led by James and Margaret Dutton (McGraw and Hill), and two Pinkerton agents (Elliott and Garrett) endures dangerous river crossings, wild weather swings and blinding dust storms. Cast members told me that conditions could be terribly difficult, particularly the harsh cold of Montana. They were quick to add that they would do it all over again. The common reaction is they all felt they couldn’t recall being offered scripts quite as good as the 10 that Sheridan wrote and sent them.
“Tim probably had said yes by this point, and look, I knew Taylor was an amazing writer,” Hill said. “But going in to do something with my husband…we had been asked to do this a lot, to be on screen together. This needed to be something that could not be compared to anything else, period. It’s just not something I wanted to give away. Upon reading the first couple of episodes, wow. Holy cow, is this amazing. So I said I was very interested. This sounds like it could be it. And the episodes just kept coming in, and I just had never read anything like it, to be honest. And then, the perspective from Elsa’s voice, that she carries this show and how it’s seen through her eyes and her voice. As a woman, as a mom with three daughters, I just thought, ‘My God, this is extraordinary writing for anyone, but for a young woman, it’s really extraordinary.’ And I just felt the characters were great. They were colorful. They were intense. There’s tragedy. There’s passion. There’s a little bit of humor, and Sam and Lamonica bring that in various ways. I just thought, this may be the time that we could actually do this together. I was just blown away by the writing, and by the writing for Isabel just floored me.”
So caught up in Sheridan’s prose, Hill hadn’t really considered the price she and the cast would pay to shoot it.
“I pretty much underestimated it all, if you want my honest opinion,” Hill said. “I knew that I was not afraid of hard work. I don’t think anyone here is. Tim is not. We grew up with hard working parents and that’s the only way we know. Taylor did say that this would be unlike anything we had ever done before, and that the work would be really, really hard because he’d want it to be authentic. It was hard, physically and mentally challenging, but we were trained by the best of the best, the wranglers, the stunt men and women. Guns and armory, the set, the costuming, everything just put us there in that place, in that time. So it was harder than we thought including driving that wagon, but I learned to love it. And better on the wagon than I am on a horse.”
For Garrett, the chance for a Black actor to play a starring role in an 1800s Western, and be depicted in the show’s credits, is a milestone that made him most proud.
“[My character] Thomas was a Buffalo soldier, and Shea [Elliott] was his captain,” Garrett said. “They fought the war together, they’ve been battle-tested together, and when the war ended, the Buffalo soldiers’ jobs turned into something that they didn’t sign up for. So, they became Pinkerton agents, and they’ve just been joined at the hip since then. They’ve been traveling, helping people, been protecting people. Thomas knows Shea like no one else, and Shea sees Thomas. Now, in this time period, you could walk around every day and not be seen. Just because people lay eyes on you doesn’t mean they see you. Shea was one of the first people that saw Thomas, and they just became inseparable.”
Growing up, Garrett watched some Westerns, and of course he noticed that Black characters were barely seen.
“I get emotional about it,” he said. “My background, my parents’ background…my dad, his family, a lot of brothers and sisters, they were sharecroppers in Mississippi. My mom, she was raised by a woman who was born a slave, her grandmother, and it’s significant. The opening credits of a show weren’t usually there for Black actors. Raymond St. Jacques was the first, in the last season of Rawhide when there a sketch of his face, and Otis Young was one of the first to have his name in the opening credits of The Outcasts. There was Danny Glover, though they didn’t have the faces in the opening of Lonesome Dove. So, having my name and your face in the beginning as one of the stars of a Western, in that tintype, black and white, old…I saw that at the theater a couple weeks ago in Amarillo. They showed it for the cast and crew, and at first, I didn’t want to go because I didn’t want to see things that might get in my head or affect my performance. But as I saw it, and my face popped up…I haven’t cried that much since my friend’s funeral, four years ago. It affected me. I don’t know where it came from. Knowing the history of it, and doing my research, and just knowing what I saw and what I didn’t see growing up, it all came to that moment right there on that screen.”
The Western he most admired was Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, also a favorite of Sheridan’s.
“There’s a line I have quoted all the time for the last 20 years,” Garrett said. “It’s at the end of the movie when Clint Eastwood’s William Munny is about to shoot Gene Hackman’s Little Bill in Greeley’s Tavern, and when Bill says he doesn’t deserve this, Munny says, ‘Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.’ And Bill says, ‘I’ll see you in hell, William Munny.’ There’s a moment in this season where, when we got to it, Taylor came over and said, ‘Let’s meat this up some more. Before you shoot him…Taylor gave me this little thick monologue. It didn’t hit me until we were done shooting and I got in bed that night. I called my wife and said, ‘I had my William Munny moment!’ ”
Elliott seems as natural for a period Western as a saddle on a horse. He said he felt he’d done enough Westerns to be typecast, and has turned down many offers until Sheridan called and sent him the 1883 script. As he read the first pages describing a tragedy in the life of his character Shea Brennan, Elliott was hooked immediately.
“I don’t know that I ever thought about a legacy for myself, so to speak,” Elliott said. “I just thought about how fortunate I was to do what I wanted to do when I was 9 years old, because of my Western heritage and my family’s for several generations, they were all Texans, and most all of them from West Texas. I think that the Western genre automatically spoke out to me on some level.
“It’s strange to me how parts in Western films have come around to me and continue to,” Elliott said. “I was working for John Milius on a show called Rough Riders and I got a call from my agent and they said hey, there’s this thing coming to you from the Coen Brothers and I was so excited…because I’d been doing a series of these Western things and there was a moment in time where I really believed I was never going to get out of this genre, that people weren’t going to see me away from this. So, I get this script and I’m so excited about it because I think I’m going to play some wacky character in some Coen Brothers movie called The Big Lebowski. I start reading it and I start looking at the character script and I said, ‘What the f*ck, it’s another cowboy!’ This one’s a drugstore cowboy, but still, it’s a cowboy. The film wasn’t a Western, but the guy is a cowboy. Sitting at the bar with a cowboy hat on. Dressed like a cowboy. Talking like a cowboy. Down through the ages. Through the sands of time. You got to be careful, I guess, how many Westerns you do or they’re going to think that’s all you can do.”
Why did he return and put back on the cowboy hat?
“Taylor’s script,” he said. “I knew his work as an actor, and because of his films. Sicario, for starters. The thing he did with Jeff [Bridges in Hell or High Water] blew me away. The guy writes brilliant stuff. He’s not a bad director either, but I love his dialogue. I love that it’s spare and he doesn’t waste a lot of words. That speaks to me. At the same time, it’s intelligent, insightful. It’s all those things that an actor would love to do and it’s always fun to see yourself in some role that’s more interesting than you are personally. That is such a gift.”
Perhaps the most complex character is McGraw’s James Dutton, the connective tissue between 1883 and Costner’s Yellowstone character John Dutton. James Dutton is a farmer, but the first time we see him, he’s racing his wagon away from a band of horse thieves. By the time the dust settles, he’s killed every last man. We learn in flashback that he was a Confederate officer with a bad case of Ptsd – in a scene he shares with Tom Hanks. James Dutton has seen enough of Texas and his only concern is bringing his wary wife, daughter and son far West for a new life with the promise of solitude. He is part of a wagon train only because he becomes persuaded there is safety in numbers.
McGraw has shown a screen presence in films like Friday Night Lights and The Blind Side, but his priority has long been singing and touring as one of C&w music’s top performers. 1883 is by far the biggest challenge he has faced onscreen, and McGraw threw himself into it. Like everything in the Taylor Sheridan Universe, it started with the phone call from Sheridan.
“I always thought I’d love to do a Western, if something good ever came along,” he said. “The way it worked with Taylor was, my agent said Taylor wants your number. Yes, give it to him. He asked if I was a fan of Yellowstone, and I said of course I was. He asked if I would like to be on the show. I told him I’d love to do it, but I didn’t want to just be some sort of singing cowboy that comes on and gets taken to the train station or something like that. He goes, well, I might have an idea. Give me a week or so. And then, he called me back, and he told me the idea that he had, to do a flashback scene with me as the original Dutton who founded the Yellowstone Ranch. And I thought, now, that’s interesting. I really like that. And that is how the whole ball started rolling.”
McGraw said at that point, Sheridan never mentioned the possibility his character would anchor a spinoff series.
“I didn’t know if he knew then or not, but he didn’t tell me he knew that,” McGraw said. “But knowing Taylor, I’m sure he had that idea cooking in the back of his head. So we shot the flashback scenes, and a couple months later, I got a call from him. He says, you know, dude, I just showed these scenes to the studio, and they want to do a prequel of all of this, if you’re interested in it. I’m like, well, yeah, I’m interested. And then he started sending the scripts, and I was just blown away. This is one of the best things I’d ever read. Faith and I, we both kind of became obsessed with them. And then Sam got involved.”
The decision came down to what he and Hill wanted to do with the next chapter of their lives. They are now empty nesters, their three daughters off on their own. They could certainly continue on their comfortable musical track of recording and touring. But those scripts…
“We knew we were in for a lot, that this was going to be a huge production with a lot of work, that it was going to take a lot of people to pull it off, and it was going to take a lot of elbow grease,” McGraw said. “I remember, we had the contracts on our porch, and we were sitting there looking at them. I told Faith, first off, when we sign these contracts, we are not the boss anymore. And then secondly, we’re either going to be burning hot or freezing cold, and there’s never going to be any in-between. That’s the way this shoot’s going to go, and it’s going to be a lot of hard work. Of course, she’s a hard worker, so she was ready for it, and we’d fallen in love with the scripts so much. But we did think about the logistics and how hard it was going to be to get everything done in the time frame they were shooting for.”
As for the expansion of the Dutton mythology, McGraw said he and Costner have not compared notes. “When I was on set doing Yellowstone, we texted back and forth a few times but never got the chance to hang out. So I don’t really know Kevin, but I feel like I know John Dutton from watching Yellowstone so much,” he said. “I think the show will stand on its own and you’ll love it if you watch Yellowstone or you will go and watch Yellowstone to see the continuation of the story. But here you’ll see the gene pool of the Dutton family and the correlation between the original family to the modern Yellowstone Dutton family. You’ll see where the toughness, the stubbornness, the dedication to family comes from.”
McGraw respected that his character carries physical and existential war wounds and a stint in a Union prison camp that almost killed him.
“One of the things that drew me to James’ character is he’s such a complex guy, and there’s so much going on in his head, and so much in his backstory,” he said. “And the arc of his character; he starts out caring only about his family, but grows to care about these people he’s leading. He may not show it, but you can see it in his actions and the things that he does. His Ptsd is certainly there, and that’s part of what I put on him right away, from his time in the Civil War. In my mind, I don’t think he wanted to be a part of that war anyway, and didn’t believe in it. And then the South after the war and Reconstruction and the terrible mess that was made, I think that he just wanted to get out of there, and take his family to an untainted place. I think he is trying to escape his ghosts. I don’t know that he ever clearly escapes them but hopefully, he finds peace down the road. But I think that it’s something that’s always there in him, and it’s something that drives him, that and the love of his family.”
What’s Next In The Sheridan Series Universe
“I don’t know how to make a TV show,” Sheridan told me at one point, at least not the way that other prolific show creators like Chuck Lorre, Shonda Rhimes, Ryan Murphy and Greg Berlanti do it, which involves a lot of delegation and trust. “I don’t have any idea and don’t really care to learn. I don’t do pattern budgeting, or write act breaks into things. I write 10-hour movies, and go shoot them. I don’t have a writers room, I’ve written them all myself. It’s not for lack of effort, I’ve tried three times.”
Why hadn’t it worked?
“Maybe this is coming from a bit of a place of ignorance because I’ve never been in a writers room, but there are certain tropes and structures that TV shows have relied on for a really, really long time,” he said. “Certain buttons and A stories and B stories that you can drop them into any show, I don’t do that,” he said. “So, for someone who’s an experienced staff writer to come along and attempt to figure out this bizarre stream-of-consciousness writing I do, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to them. I don’t do outlines. I’ve just sat down and written all the episodes before we started filming. That way everybody knows what we’re doing, all the way through.”
Sheridan to this point has been so hands on that he will work solely on one season of a series at a time, take a couple weeks off and then face the next 10-episode season deadline. Ideas and creative solutions come to him often while he is on horseback, doing what to him is the meditative ranch work that Yellowstone’s John Dutton not coincidentally has taken up this season since recovering from near-fatal gunshot wounds.
Sheridan’s strategy was somewhat inspired by that memorable first season of True Detective that starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, and had the authorship of director Cary Joji Fukunaga and creator Nic Pizzolatto doing all the episodes. The result was game-changing for actors and filmmakers, who saw the limitations of two-hour movie run times eliminated, with characters able to reveal themselves slowly.
“What Cary did, I am doing,” Sheridan said. “Write 10-hour movies and go shoot them. I’ve been working with the same crew since Wind River and we have such a shorthand. It’s still challenging, because everything I shoot takes place outside for the most part and we’re beholden to the weather and have to force our way through. But at the end of the day, to go to some of these locations where most people have never been, where you’re opening up a new world, and all of these places or characters in the story, to me, it’s fascinating.
“Because it is so hard, physically, on the actors, on the crew, I feel like the shots look earned. And because Paramount trusts me and gives me the time to go shoot 10 to 14 days for a television episode, we can treat it like a movie, and it looks like a movie. We can take the time to rehearse it and light it and build these set pieces. And if I call them and say, I need two helicopters in one day, they just go, all right.”
Sheridan, who only stopped directing every Yellowstone episode because he was obligated to direct the Angelina Jolie film Those Who Wish Me Dead, has by necessity begun to loosen his grip a bit.
Over the last five years Glasser has spent most of his time in Sheridan’s orbit after exiting The Weinstein Company to form 101 Studios, staking $20 million to keep the then modestly rated Yellowstone going. 101 cohort David Hutkin runs the rest of the business in Hollywood, and they handle things like marketing and other tasks to simplify Sheridan’s life. Glasser said that when Sheridan refers to a writers room, he knows they’re necessary, but that doesn’t mean he has to spend his days in one because his gift is creating shows and writing scripts. Before, the process was Sheridan kicking round ideas for his Yellowstone castmember Hugh Dillon for Mayor of Kingstown, and EP Antoine Fuqua. Now that Sheridan has become a mini industry, 101 is surrounding Sheridan with experienced writer-producers to run the shows with him and who know what they’re doing.
The Sopranos and The Wolf of Wall Street’s Terence Winter signed on to shepherd Kansas City, for which Sheridan wrote the pilot. In his first major series role, Stallone plays a loyal mobster in New York who thinks that finally he’ll become a boss and put in control of a major territory. They give him Kansas City. In a fish-out-of water-drama that has the violence and humor of Goodfellas, Stallone’s mob boss has to figure out how to navigate and control a city filled with legalized marijuana shops, designer coffeehouses, hipsters and skinny jeans.
The series, and Stallone’s commitment, came together as most things do in Sheridan’s world. Quickly.
Said Glasser: “On Kansas City, I call Taylor on a Friday, and I say to him, we love Stallone and we’re both looking for something for him, why don’t we do something in the mob space? I’ve always wanted to make Mario Puzo’s Omerta, and I said, Taylor what if you came up with the cool wildness of Goodfellas with Stallone. He takes a breath, I’m not even joking, and he goes hmm, that’s a good idea, Glasser. Then, on the spot, he proceeds to spend 45 minutes pitching me a story that he just created in his head. This is Friday at 3 p.m. It is a great story, and nothing is written down. By Sunday afternoon, he handed me the pilot. I couldn’t believe it. I call the network, I say, ‘I have another show that Taylor just finished.’ They go, ‘What do you mean?’ Meanwhile, Taylor calls Sly that Sunday and he says, I have this idea. I’m going to write it. What do you think? He pitched it to him and Sly said yes on the phone. By the time we got to the network on Monday, we had a script and Stallone attached.
“This is how it happens with him,” Glasser said. “He just picks up the phone and calls people like Billy Bob Thornton, Tom Hanks, Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw and says, hey, I’ve got this idea. I call to do the deal with the agent afterwards.”
Another drama series on the front burner is Bass Reeves, and Sheridan has secured as showrunner Pat Charles, whose writing-producing work includes the CW series Black Lightning, Iron Fist and Bones. Charles is writing that pilot and will run the show with Sheridan. They are zeroing in on a star they wouldn’t name to play the title character, who was considered the greatest Black lawman who lived in the 1800s.
Also in the near term is Lioness, a fact-based drama about a U.S. undercover female operative program in which a pair of operatives are sent to infiltrate various nefarious cells involving everything from drug cartels to the war in Afghanistan. Sheridan wrote the first two episodes and they are zeroing in on cast he would not name. Tom Brady (Hell on Wheels and NOS4A2) will be the showrunner with Sheridan.
Finally, there is Landman, a drama inspired by the Texas Monthly and Imperative Entertainment podcast “Boomtown,” about the oil boom in the Permian Basin in West Texas. Sheridan will write at least the pilot for a drama full of roughnecks and wildcatters.
There is also the fifth season of Yellowstone to begin production in May, and second seasons of Mayor of Kingstown and 1883, 10 episodes each. In the current season of Yellowstone, Sheridan has been teasing the prospect of a Texas-set spinoff series to take place on the 6666 Ranch they’re purchasing, but he said that one hasn’t quite taken shape yet. Future seasons of 1883 will likely evolve into the development of the Duttons through the years, rather than being an endless wagon train ride.
Why Sheridan Is A Man On Fire
Much of Sheridan’s motivation came from the hard lessons he learned coming up, and that includes acting and screenwriting. For instance, he doesn’t have time to write movies right now, but you won’t likely find him doing that for films he doesn’t direct, after the disappointment he felt with the Tom Clancy adaptation Without Remorse. As for his prolific pace as a writer and storyteller, the words started pouring out of him when he saw the writing on the wall for his acting career. He’d been trying out for and playing parts for years — he first became aware of Yellowstone stalwart Cole Hauser after Sheridan auditioned for the Wooderson character in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused that launched the career of Matthew McConaughey — but Sheridan’s comeuppance came while playing his highest-profile role to that moment, the sheriff in the lawless hometown of Sons of Anarchy. Any illusions he had about his worth were shattered when it was time to negotiate an extension.
“I’ve always said Hollywood will tell you what you’re supposed to be doing, if you will listen,” he said. “At that time, they were offering me what I thought was a very unfair wage. It was less than virtually every other person on the show, and not enough for me to quit my second job. So, the business affairs attorney, who I won’t name, here’s what he told my attorney who said, look, there’s kids on the Cartoon Network making more than you’re offering this guy.
“The guy goes, ‘I know and you’re right that he probably deserves to make more, but we’re not going to pay him more because guess what, he’s not worth more,’ ” Sheridan recalled. “‘That’s what he’s worth. There’s 50 of him. He is 11 on the call sheet. That’s what that guy is, and that’s all he’s ever going to be.’ And that’s really when I quit. It wasn’t so much over money. It was so much more that that’s how the business saw me. It wasn’t just this jerk business affairs attorney who simply articulated what obviously was said in a room with a bunch of executives when they decided ‘Nope, we’re going to save a dollar here. He’s easy to replace because he’s just not that good at his job. Let’s replace him with someone cheaper.’ And I decided right there that I didn’t want to be 11 on the call sheet for the rest of my life. Now, I am happily 11 on the call sheet on Yellowstone, but I don’t think anybody wants to watch me do anything on television for an hour because the business told me they don’t. They told me I’m supposed to story tell behind the camera. And so, the only reason I am in front of the camera playing [the horse trainer] Travis is because I grew up on a ranch, riding horses. There’s just not another actor out there who can do those things on a horse.”
Influenced by writers ranging from Toni Morrison to Hemingway, Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry and from reading a lot of American history when it got too hot to be outside on that Texas ranch he grew up on, Sheridan hunkered down and began writing. Those writers were the inspiration, and the guard rail was all the bad, cliché-ridden scripts he routinely read for auditions. He had Mayor of Kingstown kicking around his head for a decade, but the first script he finished and sold was Sicario, which in the hands of Denis Villenueve became a harrowing cartel thriller. In quick succession, the scripts finished included Hell or High Water, the Sicario sequel Soldado and then Wind River, the latter of which gave him his directing debut.
His current station is much better than 11 on a call sheet. Paramount+ is showing a voracious appetite to order up as many series as he can create, for a streaming service whose subscriber potential rests on his broad shoulders. And when he cold calls and then sends his scripts to Kevin Costner, Jeremy Renner, Sylvester Stallone, Tom Hanks, Billy Bob Thornton, Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, more often than not they respond to his writing by starring or guest starring in his work. Sheridan acknowledges that he is in a sweet spot right now, but past tough times keep him from taking it for granted. There is no telling when people might get tired of what he’s writing, he said. So for now, he’s determined to make the absolute most of it.
- 12/17/2021
- by Mike Fleming Jr
- Deadline Film + TV
Pioneer days never looked so good.
The premiere to the Yellowstone prequel 1883 was held Saturday night at the Wynn Resorts Las Vegas, as Studio 101 and Paramount+ showcased their high hopes for the new series in epic style. The first two episodes of the prequel series were screened, following the Dutton family as they embark on the journey west through the Great Plains.
The series bows on Paramount+ on December 19.
101 Studios CEO David C. Glasser and 1883 creator Taylor Sheridan introduced the screening, That was followed by an after-party at Sw Steakhouse on the property, featuring a custom 1883 light show on the resort’s Lake of Dreams. Throughout the night, a five-piece orchestra played the score of 1883, created by composer Brian Tyler.
Attending the event and starring in the series were Tim McGraw (James Dutton), Faith Hill (Margaret Dutton), Sam Elliott (Shea Brennan), and Billy Bob Thornton (Jim Courtright).
Executives...
The premiere to the Yellowstone prequel 1883 was held Saturday night at the Wynn Resorts Las Vegas, as Studio 101 and Paramount+ showcased their high hopes for the new series in epic style. The first two episodes of the prequel series were screened, following the Dutton family as they embark on the journey west through the Great Plains.
The series bows on Paramount+ on December 19.
101 Studios CEO David C. Glasser and 1883 creator Taylor Sheridan introduced the screening, That was followed by an after-party at Sw Steakhouse on the property, featuring a custom 1883 light show on the resort’s Lake of Dreams. Throughout the night, a five-piece orchestra played the score of 1883, created by composer Brian Tyler.
Attending the event and starring in the series were Tim McGraw (James Dutton), Faith Hill (Margaret Dutton), Sam Elliott (Shea Brennan), and Billy Bob Thornton (Jim Courtright).
Executives...
- 12/12/2021
- by Bruce Haring
- Deadline Film + TV
Tim McGraw, Faith Hill and Billy Bob Thornton were on hand Saturday for the red carpet premiere of “1883,” their new “Yellowstone” origin series on Paramount Plus, at the Wynn Las Vegas.
Also hitting the two-episode screening at the Encore Theater and after-party at Sw Steakhouse — hosted by the streamer and 101 Studios — were series creator, writer and director Taylor Sheridan and cast members Sam Elliott, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, James Landry Hébert, Dawn Olivieri, Graciela Brancusi, Amanda Jaros and Martin Sensmeier.
Premiering on Dec. 19 on Paramount Plus, “1883” follows the Dutton family as they make their way across the Great Plains for a new life in Montana.
Saturday night’s guest list also included ViacomCBS president and CEO Bob Bakish, 101 Studios CEO David C. Glasser and Wynn Resorts CEO Craig Billings.
The evening also featured a custom light show on the Wynn’s Lake of Dreams.
Also hitting the two-episode screening at the Encore Theater and after-party at Sw Steakhouse — hosted by the streamer and 101 Studios — were series creator, writer and director Taylor Sheridan and cast members Sam Elliott, Isabel May, Lamonica Garrett, Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, James Landry Hébert, Dawn Olivieri, Graciela Brancusi, Amanda Jaros and Martin Sensmeier.
Premiering on Dec. 19 on Paramount Plus, “1883” follows the Dutton family as they make their way across the Great Plains for a new life in Montana.
Saturday night’s guest list also included ViacomCBS president and CEO Bob Bakish, 101 Studios CEO David C. Glasser and Wynn Resorts CEO Craig Billings.
The evening also featured a custom light show on the Wynn’s Lake of Dreams.
- 12/12/2021
- by Marc Malkin
- Variety Film + TV
The “Yellowstone” prequel series “1883” at Paramount Plus has added Graham Greene to its cast, Variety has learned exclusively.
The prequel series follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains. Greene will play Spotted Eagle, a Crow elder who spots the wagon train and tells James Dutton about the place, Paradise Valley, where he should settle with his family.
Greene earned an Academy Award nomination for his role as Kicking Bird (Ziŋtká Nagwáka) in “Dances with Wolves.” He is also known for starring in films like “The Green Mile,” “Maverick,” and “Wind River,” the last of which was written and directed by “1883” creator and “Yellowstone” co-creator Taylor Sheridan. His TV credits include “Northern Exposure,” “The Adventures of Dudley the Dragon,” “Longmire,” and “Goliath.”
He is repped by Greene & Associates Talent Agency.
The main cast of “1883” includes Tim McGraw, Faith Hill,...
The prequel series follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains. Greene will play Spotted Eagle, a Crow elder who spots the wagon train and tells James Dutton about the place, Paradise Valley, where he should settle with his family.
Greene earned an Academy Award nomination for his role as Kicking Bird (Ziŋtká Nagwáka) in “Dances with Wolves.” He is also known for starring in films like “The Green Mile,” “Maverick,” and “Wind River,” the last of which was written and directed by “1883” creator and “Yellowstone” co-creator Taylor Sheridan. His TV credits include “Northern Exposure,” “The Adventures of Dudley the Dragon,” “Longmire,” and “Goliath.”
He is repped by Greene & Associates Talent Agency.
The main cast of “1883” includes Tim McGraw, Faith Hill,...
- 12/6/2021
- by Joe Otterson
- Variety Film + TV
Paramount Plus has unveiled an official trailer for the “Yellowstone” prequel series “1883.”
“1883” follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of untamed America, offering audiences a stark retelling of western expansion and a study of one family fleeing poverty to seek a better future in America’s promised land, Montana.
The trailer opens with a shootout in a field, and as it comes to a close, John Dutton (Tim McGraw) says to two nearby men, “So y’all just sit and watch? Thanks for the help.” The trailer continues as you follow Dutton and his family attempting to travel west until they find “country’s worth the journey.” Clips are shown of the journey beginning to intensify, as Shea Brennan (Sam Elliott) attempts to control the traveling group, saying in one clip, “You can police yourselves or I can do it,...
“1883” follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of untamed America, offering audiences a stark retelling of western expansion and a study of one family fleeing poverty to seek a better future in America’s promised land, Montana.
The trailer opens with a shootout in a field, and as it comes to a close, John Dutton (Tim McGraw) says to two nearby men, “So y’all just sit and watch? Thanks for the help.” The trailer continues as you follow Dutton and his family attempting to travel west until they find “country’s worth the journey.” Clips are shown of the journey beginning to intensify, as Shea Brennan (Sam Elliott) attempts to control the traveling group, saying in one clip, “You can police yourselves or I can do it,...
- 12/3/2021
- by Katie Song
- Variety Film + TV
1883 Trailer 2 and New Cast Members Announced — The second teaser trailer and new cast members for 1883 (2021) have been released by Paramount+. View here the first 1883 teaser trailer. Press Release Paramount+ Announces Series Regulars And Additional Cast For Highly-anticipated Original Series, “1883” Audie Rick, Marc Rissmann, Eric Nelsen, James Landry Hébert, [...]
Continue reading: 1883 (2021) Teaser Trailer 2 & New Cast Member Announced for Paramount+’s TV Series Prequel to Yellowstone...
Continue reading: 1883 (2021) Teaser Trailer 2 & New Cast Member Announced for Paramount+’s TV Series Prequel to Yellowstone...
- 11/27/2021
- by Rollo Tomasi
- Film-Book
By just about any metric, Paramount Network drama Yellowstone is one of the most popular shows on television.
Created by actor-turned-filmmaker Taylor Sheridan and starring Kevin Costner, Yellowstone boasts some truly eye-popping viewership numbers. Though the show was a hit right out of the gate, it’s reached new heights in its fourth season. The season 4 premiere drew in 12.7 million viewers in the Nielsen Ratings Live+3 metric. That made it the most-watched premiere on cable since The Walking Dead in 2017.
Naturally, a show this successful almost has to become a franchise and introduce at least one spinoff. Well, that’s exactly what Paramount has done here. After signing a second major deal with Sheridan, Paramount will bring a Yellowstone prequel called 1883 to its streaming service Paramount+. As its name implies, 1883 will take place in the 19th century and document the expanding American frontier. Not only that but it...
Created by actor-turned-filmmaker Taylor Sheridan and starring Kevin Costner, Yellowstone boasts some truly eye-popping viewership numbers. Though the show was a hit right out of the gate, it’s reached new heights in its fourth season. The season 4 premiere drew in 12.7 million viewers in the Nielsen Ratings Live+3 metric. That made it the most-watched premiere on cable since The Walking Dead in 2017.
Naturally, a show this successful almost has to become a franchise and introduce at least one spinoff. Well, that’s exactly what Paramount has done here. After signing a second major deal with Sheridan, Paramount will bring a Yellowstone prequel called 1883 to its streaming service Paramount+. As its name implies, 1883 will take place in the 19th century and document the expanding American frontier. Not only that but it...
- 11/19/2021
- by Alec Bojalad
- Den of Geek
Delving into the origins of the Dutton family in 1883 will be a fun experience.
Months after the preliminary cast of the Yellowstone spinoff was revealed, Paramount+ is revealing all the goodies ahead of launch.
Below, we've rounded up all the new faces and who they'll be playing when the series launches on December 19.
- Audie Rick will play young John Dutton Sr.
- Marc Rissmann will play Josef, a European immigrant who is married to Risa, who travels with an employed crew to guide his group across the frontier.
- Eric Nelsen will play Ennis, a young, handsome cowboy who agrees to help escort a group of inexperienced men, women and children north to find a home.
- James Landry Hébert will play Wade, a young cowboy who finds himself as part of a crew for a caravan of hopeful travelers making their way north for a better life.
- Dawn Olivieri will play Claire,...
Months after the preliminary cast of the Yellowstone spinoff was revealed, Paramount+ is revealing all the goodies ahead of launch.
Below, we've rounded up all the new faces and who they'll be playing when the series launches on December 19.
- Audie Rick will play young John Dutton Sr.
- Marc Rissmann will play Josef, a European immigrant who is married to Risa, who travels with an employed crew to guide his group across the frontier.
- Eric Nelsen will play Ennis, a young, handsome cowboy who agrees to help escort a group of inexperienced men, women and children north to find a home.
- James Landry Hébert will play Wade, a young cowboy who finds himself as part of a crew for a caravan of hopeful travelers making their way north for a better life.
- Dawn Olivieri will play Claire,...
- 11/19/2021
- by Paul Dailly
- TVfanatic
Exclusive: Taylor Sheridan’s anticipated Yellowstone prequel 1883 has announced the full cast ahead of the December 19 premiere on Paramount+. Audie Rick (Kenobi: A Star Wars Story), Marc Rissmann (Game of Thrones), Eric Nelsen and James Landry Hébert (Once Upon A Time In Hollywood) are set as series regulars alongside previously announced Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Billy Bob Thornton, Isabel May and Lamonica Garrett. Additional cast includes Dawn Olivieri (Bright), Emma Malouff (American Crime Story), Alex Fine, Gratiela Brancusi, Anna Fiamora (A Shining Moment), Nichole Galicia (Django Unchained), Stephanie Nur (Four Women and a Funeral), Amanda Jaros (Women of the Movement), Noah Le Gros (A Score to Settle) and Martin Sensmeier (Yellowstone).
Created by Sheridan, 1883 follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of untamed America. It is a stark retelling of Western expansion, and an intense study...
Created by Sheridan, 1883 follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of untamed America. It is a stark retelling of Western expansion, and an intense study...
- 11/18/2021
- by Denise Petski
- Deadline Film + TV
"The Empire doesn't know we're here. And they never will." While we wait for the official Obi-Wan Kenobi series Lucasfilm is developing there's an outstanding fan film to watch. Kenobi is a beautifully realized 18-minute short about Ben Kenobi living on Tatooine. Similar to the upcoming series, the film is about Ben protecting Luke when he's young, living in the desert watching over him from afar. Jamie Costa stars as Kenobi, with a cast including Tommy Snider as Owen Lars, Maxine Phoenix as Beru, Audie Rick as Luke, and James Arnold Taylor as Captain Leegus. This short has a lovely score, some great FX, and a fantastic performance by Costa. Highly recommend watching. Thanks to Kottke for the tip on this one. Original description from YouTube: "A short fan film about the life of Obi-Wan Kenobi on the planet of Tatooine." Kenobi is directed by filmmaker Jason Satterlund -...
- 1/22/2020
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
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