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- [00:00]
Emma Chamberlain
Hey, it's Emma Chamberlain. I designed these new glasses for Warby.
- [00:04]
Rick Marin
Parker and I basically can't take them off.
- [00:06]
Emma Chamberlain
Like I'm showering in them and sleeping in them. They're just that good.
- [00:10]
Rick Marin
Go see them all@warbyparker.com and you know what?
- [00:14]
Emma Chamberlain
Have a good day too.
- [00:15]
Rick Marin
Okay? All right, bye. This episode is brought to you by Dutch Bros. Big smiles, rocking tunes and epic drinks. Dutch Bros. Is all about you.
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Emma Chamberlain
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Rick Marin
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Emma Chamberlain
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Rick Marin
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- [00:45]
Emma Chamberlain
14 day expiration terms apply. See Dutchbros.com.
- [00:57]
Rick Marin
Expect the worst. Some preach champion pain.
- [01:01]
Emma Chamberlain
Some die of thirst. The of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best. Expect the worst. Welcome to this holiday edition of the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. I'm John Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary, and joining me today, one of my oldest friends and the author of the current cover story in Commentary magazine. A surprise topic for many people who come to Commentary for political discussions and discussions of Israel and discussions of Trump. And all of these, maybe with the exception of Israel, do appear in Rick Marin's article, the Anti Woke King of Hollywood Lets Loose our January cover story. And yes, with me today, the author of Cad Memoirs, Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor, former columnist for the New York Times, former critic for Newsweek magazine, and a longtime writer for television. Rick, welcome to the Commentary Magazine podcast.
- [02:18]
Rick Marin
Thanks. Great to be here.
- [02:20]
Emma Chamberlain
So you have written pieces over the years about Hollywood for Commentary about your. Not really about your experiences, but very much informed by your experience as someone who's written for six or seven television shows over the last 20 years. And this is actually the second article that you have written for Commentary on the subject of one Taylor Sheridan. So why don't you tell everybody who may not know who Taylor Sheridan is, who Taylor Sheridan is and why we would devote the COVID of commentary magazine to Mr. Taylor Sheridan.
- [03:03]
Rick Marin
Yeah, so Taylor Sheridan is a fascinating character. He is a former actor. For the first part of his career in Hollywood, he was a character actor who would appear in various TV shows that you or may not have seen. And then I believe at age 40, he decided to write a script movie script for a movie called Hell or High Water, which was sort of a a bank heist set in Texas during the financial crisis. And it was about two brothers who to save their ranch Essentially decided to rob a bunch of banks. The same banks that were ripping off his, his mother and the reason they were losing the ranch. It got an Oscar nomination. It was very good. And it led to a bunch of other stuff. Notably the first big hit was the piece that I wrote for you guys last time, which is about the TV show Yellowstone, which to every. Which was passed on by every major place, hbo, all the, you know, all the big time places and picked up by the Paramount network and became a monster surprise hit where it was the kind of thing where it was getting. The only thing that was getting better ratings than Yellowstone was NFL football.
- [04:17]
Emma Chamberlain
And on a channel, on a. On a cable channel that literally no one was watching and that you had to search high and low simply to find on your cable dial. So that the fact that 14 or 15 million people would watch it in the course of a week was a miracle in and of itself because nobody even knew where the Paramount network was on there. It was. This is not a streaming channel. This is a cable over the air channel.
- [04:45]
Rick Marin
Yeah, I mean and you know, it had a big star in Kevin Costner and. But yes, very obscure and hard to find. And it was sort of the success of it. It was described as things like a red state succession in the sense that it was kind of a King Lear story about Kevin Costner is the potash familias of this Montana ranch family with three originally four children and who was. Who am I going to leave the ranch to? And it just became this monster hit that then led to a whole bunch of other shows which is kind of what I wrote about in this piece, which is why we call him the anti woke king of Hollywood because he has now, I believe an additional stink theories all on Paramount plus now they're a little easier to watch than Yellowstone, which is still difficult because of complicated kind of boring Hollywood reasons. But he has become Paramount streaming service, Paramount plus he has basically become that network. He has a show called. He did a show called Bass Reeves Lawman about the first original black Marshall in the old west. He did two prequels to Yellowstone, 1923 and 1883, both of which big hits, both very good. The stars like Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford. I mean it got to. It's gotten to the point where huge stars are lining to do Taylor Sheridan shows, the most recent of which is Billy Bob Thornton, who's the star of this show called Land, which is about the West Texas oil boom, recent West Texas oil boom fueled by fracking. And it's centered around A kind of wildcat outfit who's run by a billionaire played by Jon Hamm. And Billy Bob Thornton is his landman, which is basically the man on the ground who deals with everything from cartels trying to claim they own the land to his crazy wife and daughter who come and live with him in his strange house that he shares with a lawyer and a roughneck oil worker. So it. And what's interesting, and the reason we did this story was that he was always, you know, as I said, people called Yellowstone red state succession because the politics of it were very kind of. His politics were kind of like all about being close, connected to the land, just trusting the federal government, rugged individualism, all that stuff. And you can see Kevin Costner embodying all those things. Very pro Native American, again, because he's. They, in his view, you know, are people who are close to the land and who have been like, in his view, of many people screwed by the federal government. So now. So that was there, you know, but a sort of libertarian conservatism, what you.
- [07:44]
Emma Chamberlain
Might call a weird combination.
- [07:47]
Rick Marin
Yeah.
- [07:48]
Emma Chamberlain
Of Jeffersonian. Small is better than big.
- [07:53]
Rick Marin
Yeah.
- [07:54]
Emma Chamberlain
Country is better than city, and individualism is better than government. Combined with Jacksonianism, which would be. What matters is what you produce with your hands. Banks are evil. Money is evil. Horses are good. Acres are good. People.
- [08:15]
Rick Marin
You know what else is evil? New York and. And Los Angeles.
- [08:20]
Emma Chamberlain
Yes. Evil.
- [08:20]
Rick Marin
Every one of us. Every one of us. He never misses a chance to just. There's one. There's a movie, a very good movie he made, called Wind river, which is about a murder set on an Indian reservation where this doomed character is kind of snuggling with his wife and they're plotting. How are they going to get off the reservation? Where should they go? New York? No way. Los Angeles. The guy goes, I'd rather be back in Iraq. So that's Taylor Sheridan's view of the Sodom and Gomorrah that are the coastal urban elites do not fare well in a Taylor Sheridan world.
- [08:57]
Emma Chamberlain
So Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, close to the Land, 1923, one of these series, as you say, in the beginning of Yellowstone, the great antagonist to the Dutton family ranch is this Native American tribe that wants. That believes that this family, back 100 years earlier expropriated its territory. As the show has progressed over the course of the five years that it's been on the air or the five year. The five seasons, the enemy of the Duttons has now become. They are basically allied against lawyers, bankers, Washington, the state capitol, in Montana. Because at least they both know that what matters is the beauty and the unspoiled beauty of this land, that all of these people want to come who are billionaires and fly their planes into a new airport and build horrible shopping malls and despoil the real America. So there's this odd journey, and in 1923, the sympathy toward Native Americans is so potent that there is a whole subplot about a Catholic school for Native American girls, which is an extraordinarily rough thing to watch because it's all about how they are abused, tortured, raped, and how they start to take revenge against again another big institution that doesn't care about the little guy, meaning the Catholic Church. So this is a very, very interestingly politically flavored show that has absolutely nothing to do with current political correctness whatsoever. And now, and now we journey into the present, into the two huge hit shows that are now on the air, meaning Landman and Lioness, which is his spy show. So he's got. Landman is about oil. Lioness is a spy show. He had made two movies about the, about the DEA in Mexico called Sicario and Sicario 2, and made a show about the mafia in Oklahoma called Tulsa King. He made a show about a town that is basically a prison that survives on being a town of prisons, that's mayor of Kingstown. All of which offer a portrait of Trump's. The America that Trump told us about in 2015, 2016. Right?
- [11:47]
Rick Marin
Yeah. Lioness, which is a show about a female CIA, a program of female CIA agents. Allegedly, it's real. And they train agents to, in female agents to infiltrate foreign governments or countries or whatever. I consider that his foreign policy show. So if you look, if you consider Landman his domestic policy for Lioness is where now you know what? One reason we thought this was a good piece is because now he's. His politics were there before, but now they're sort of unleashed. Right. So he can say whatever he wants at this point. And he is. So. Yeah. So in, in lion, in Landman, he'll just, he'll deliver a scathing rebuke to a big city lawyer about the follies of clean, so called clean energy. Right. I think you talked about that scene on, on the podcast earlier in Lioness, he delivers a whole long peroration on the decline of the American empire there that reads like something that, you know, Douglas Murray would have delivered at the Oxford Union, but he puts it in the mouth of a corrupt Mexican American money laundering brother of a cartel leader. So he says what he Wants. But he has a genius for putting it into the mouth of an interesting Eric. You know, it's. He's very good at getting. He does a lot of research. You know, I read about that. The movie Wind river that he had. He watched three years of LAPD shootout scenes to figure out how to accurately do a shootout. And what you realize is like. And it's the same with all this stuff, whether it's, you know, either he's very good at, or he's got people who are good at researching and giving you information. But he'll do it in an interesting way. So Landman, the opening of Landman is Billy Bob Thornton delivering a potentially super boring account of the difference between surface and mineral rights. You know, but he's doing it with a burlap bag on his head while being beaten up by cartel.
- [13:54]
Emma Chamberlain
Mexican drug cartel. Yeah.
- [13:56]
Rick Marin
So you're. You're in right away, you know, and you're listening.
- [13:59]
Emma Chamberlain
Whom he negotiates with successfully. By the end of the scene, they're taking the bag off his head. They're all shaking hands and driving off together.
- [14:08]
Rick Marin
They come back and they're not so happy.
- [14:09]
Emma Chamberlain
They're not so happy for the most recent episode.
- [14:12]
Rick Marin
So, you know, so. So, yes. So now he feels, I think, just completely comfortable. And who's going to tell him not to? Because these shows are all massive hits to say whatever he wants. And he, you know, he has strong opinions. So in. On the foreign. On the Lioness, my show, foreign policy front, China is the big bad. And it's kind of a convoluted, complicated plot that China is doing something in Mexico that is on our soil, through our borders. So then the message is delivered by the Secretary of State, played by Morgan Freeman, again, another huge actor. He seems to have gotten. Well, let's teach them a lesson about open borders. So this results in going to the Iran Iraq border and taking out two Chinese scientists who are being smuggled into Iran to show them that we don't pay attention to their borders either. I mean, it's the most aggressive. You know, it's not really America at first because it's like, yeah, if they're doing something, go do something there. You know, it's pretty muscular, aggressive foreign policy. But he leaves you no doubt about who the bad actors are.
- [15:21]
Emma Chamberlain
There's another scene in Landman to give you a sense. And by the way, these shows, we're making them sound didactic, which they are increasingly, but they are so insanely melodramatic that you can hardly tell because someone's gonna give a big speech and then somebody else is gonna walk into the frame and cut their head off with a machete or something like that. Just. Just to make sure that you don't forget what you're actually watching. So there's a scene in a boardroom where some guy just starts ranting about the hostility to nuclear power.
- [16:01]
Rick Marin
Right.
- [16:02]
Emma Chamberlain
Because all of these liberals hate nuclear power. And what are they, crazy? Nuclear power is the best possible kind of power. And then Jon Hamm says, I don't care about any of this. All I want is for oil to be between 78 and $86 a barrel, and then I'll be rich. And in 100 years, we'll figure something else out. No one's ever had these kinds of conversations on network television before. They are conversations of the sort that you might hear at the American Enterprise Institute, except that no one then comes into the boardroom and cuts off somebody's head with a machete.
- [16:39]
Rick Marin
Right. I mean, he's just very good at, like. Example of that Billy Bob opening with the burlap bag on his head. It's like, yeah. How do you make this information interesting? Well, have someone threatening to kill someone else while you're doing it. Or that scene I described with the drug dealer, money launderer. The tension under the scene is that his daughter, a lioness, is there to try to turn him into turning in his brother. And he doesn't know that that's why she's there. And she doesn't know if she can even do it. She's very scared. So there's always dramatic tension under this stuff that. Yeah, when we describe it, sounds pretty didactic, like, who's putting that. Who's putting oil policy and energy policy in a television show? But he does it in a way that. Yeah, you're listening because it's Jon Hamm telling this guy to shut up. And he just has a. He has a gift for that. And the stuff is. It's very soapy, which is also his gift. You know, it's both. It's a weird combination of ultra violence and soap in a way. I can't think of another series that had that.
- [17:41]
Emma Chamberlain
You know, I mean, like, imagine Dallas. But in Dallas, Junior mows people down with an AK47 every episode and then drives them to a strange area in Texas where no federal or state person has jurisdiction, dumps bodies, and then they just sit there forever. And no one ever knows that anybody was killed. That's actually a feature of Yellowstone. There's an area between Montana And Wyoming, that is known as the train station that apparently does kind of exist. Yeah. Range. Lack of jurisdiction. Of jurisdiction. And so he figured out this is where this family, which is both like the Roys in succession and like the Sopranos, can go and deal with the people they got to get rid of without anybody ever finding out. That's.
- [18:38]
Rick Marin
Well, credit. Credit to Taylor Sheridan and Kevin Costner for making a murderer someone you root for. You know, I mean, that's the Tony Soprano of it. Yeah. I mean, he's having people killed by his henchmen who is now being his own show.
- [18:55]
Emma Chamberlain
He's having his ranch hands branded to make it clear that if they ever try to leave the ranch, he'll have them killed. I mean, it's very, as I say, it's very, very, very soapy. But there is this one thing which is that you work in television so, you know, you go, go to these meetings, you go these pitch meetings and everybody's like, what are the stakes? We need to raise the stakes. There's not enough stakes in this show. There need to be stakes. And the stakes of Taylor Sheridan in this weird Jeffersonian, Jacksonian way is that what these people do is life or death. Not because it's life or death, because you know, capitalism is going to destroy everything. It's that what they do physically, they are in danger, potential danger from at all times. You work at a ranch, a horse can kick you in the head and kill you. You work, you need to put piping down on a. Where there's a. Where there's an oil rig that needs to be replaced and the piping is not properly secured and suddenly you're sliding down 200 pieces of pipe and your body is crushed under it. And that can happen any day at any time. And everybody on these shows says, I'm doing this for a living because I can make a lot of money doing it. But it's going to kill me.
- [20:16]
Rick Marin
By the way, that the opening. He's also kind of a very good. He has a good sense of story, almost like a journalist. That opening pilot of Landman is about three generations of Mexican American oil roughnecks who work on the same rig. So it's like a grandpa, the son and then sort of a son in law or something like that. Right. And they're all killed in an accident, which as you say, can happen anytime. And one of it's very dangerous work that's based on a real story, which comes from the podcast Boomtown that Taylor Sheridan based this series, Landman. It's very good. I listen to the whole thing. And he credits the creator of that podcast as co creator of Landman. But he just took that. That's a great story. It's a very moving story. And he just took that and saw that as great potential for a pilot and used it. And it's really illustrative of. Yeah, and he did a smart thing, which was cast a fairly well known actor, Michael Tania, as one of the guys. So you think, oh, this is a series regular. Because I've seen this guy before. He was in Sicario, Mexico, for example. I mean narcos Mexico.
- [21:24]
Emma Chamberlain
And then he killed Ant Man. He was Ant Man's buddy in Ant Man. Yeah, it's a.
- [21:31]
Rick Marin
He killed. He's not afraid to kill people off, which is another of his gifts. And you know, as a dramatist, which is in. In Yellowstone, he kills off one of the Heaven Coster's sons early in the first episode. Shows up now. And there's another thing he does. He used the same actors over and over again in every single show to the point where it's actually confusing. So there'll be the same actress in two shows that are airing at the same time or the same actor.
- [21:55]
Emma Chamberlain
However, they're 100 years. However they're 100 years apart. That's the other thing, is that one of them is in 1883 and the other is in 1924. 1883, by the way, which I think is probably his best show. And again, just to give you a sense of, though we don't really talk about it in the piece, just the capaciousness of his, of his gift. So 1883 is the story of how this family gets to the area where the ranch is. But that's not what the show is about. The show is about a cattle drive from Texas up through Oregon and how the entire cattle drive is a horrible, nightmarish disaster. And it's an eight episode tragedy. It's Imagine Lonesome Dove as a tragedy at the end of which almost everybody that you have followed and watched and cared about ends up dead. And it's all very credible and everything that happens is very believable. And it's kind of startling that you would get something this bleak and dark. But it's emotionally incredibly involving and also shows this astounding eye for casting because the two stars of 1883 are the country singer Tim McGraw and his wife Faith Hill, who are the original Duttons of Yellowstone. And they are sensationally good.
- [23:20]
Rick Marin
They're great.
- [23:21]
Emma Chamberlain
And everybody on these shows is like jaw droppingly good. Including all of the relatively non professional cowboys he hires to play the ranch hands and things like that.
- [23:34]
Rick Marin
Really should be noted that he's not afraid to put himself in these shows. No.
- [23:38]
Emma Chamberlain
And quite enjoy.
- [23:41]
Rick Marin
Yeah. So he has a part in Yellowstone as a horse trader and sort of scoundrel and scallywag who was a friend of the head ranch hand on. Yellowstone is a pretty funny character where he gets to show off his real life horse skills. I guess Taylor Sheridan actually knows what he's doing. So there'll be these long scenes of Taylor Sheridan in a corral doing things like spinning around like a top on a horse or a thing where you, you ride your horse and then it stops on a dime over and over and over again. But. And then he also put himself in lioness as this kind of badass, you know, contractor X Delta Force type who has this incredibly. There was one, the most recent episode where they get in some horrific firefight as part of this operation in Iraq where they almost hordes of Iranian national guard soldiers almost wiped them all out. And then after it's over, his character says something like, oh, that got a little nutty. Got a little nutty, didn't it? Like he sort of, you know, so he plays these tough guys and he likes to, he likes to put himself in there. And he's one scene, no shirt. He's clearly like spending a lot of time in the weight room.
- [24:58]
Emma Chamberlain
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- [27:42]
Rick Marin
Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply but yeah, he casting and what's interesting just politically every you know, if you assume that Most of the 90% of these actors are probably consider themselves classic Hollywood liberals. I'm not sure about Harrison Ford, but they don't have a problem with being in his shows, you know, because he knows how they know how good these shows are. I think they, they appreciate the writing. They obviously know they're popular. But I think it's just interesting that they're willing to turn off their politics. What are probably their real life politics to appear in these shows that have these long kind of quasi Trumpian screeds.
- [28:21]
Emma Chamberlain
And, and that's, that's the reason that it's an important subject because we've spent, you and I both have spent many decades trying to suss out the connection between popular culture and American politics. Does culture affect politics? Does politics affect culture? Do we watch the does Holly? Is Hollywood ruined by its obsession with kind of liberal practical politics or is it informed by them? Because this is what people want and if anything has demonstrated that There is a world that Hollywood does not understand. That is the world that voted for Donald Trump. It is the unexpected triumph of Taylor Sheridan and the fact that the Paramount network run incidentally under the corporate control of a non leftist corporate head in. Shari Redstone said, you just go do whatever you want because you obviously have some secret sauce that nobody understands. And that secret sauce is, this is a great country and there's all of these people out there who are trying to ruin it. And maybe you don't like, maybe, maybe it's vulgar who he blames and maybe it's not fair and maybe the people he lionizes don't really deserve to be lionized. But that is the drama. The dramaturgy is America was once a great country. It is being deracinated, it is being demasculinized. It's a huge issue on these shows that these men are men and that they are not afraid to use their hand. And what's more that the women, the women that you admire are tough and resolute and perfectly willing to be aggressive in pursuit of the interests of the things that they care about and to be taken care of by the men who want, who love them. So it is, it's a world that no one in Hollywood has allowed to be portrayed in this fashion, and he owns it. And these shows are getting 15, 20 million people to watch them every week. And nothing is watched by 15 million people every week anymore, ever.
- [30:51]
Rick Marin
It reminds me of a piece a million years ago when I was at the New York Times and I did a piece about stuff New Yorkers didn't know about the rest of the country like, took for granted. I forget there was something like. One of the, one of the examples though was, I think Reba McIntyre was doing a show on Broadway or something like that, and people were like, who is this amazing star? Wow, she's good.
- [31:16]
Emma Chamberlain
Yeah, she was. Annie, get your gun. Yeah, she did anything.
- [31:18]
Rick Marin
90% of America has no knows exactly. I mean, country music, huh? That's interesting. People listen to this. You know, it's like that, like it's the same thing, you know, it's like, oh, people actually want to watch, I mean, you know, shows with cowboys and, you know, where people belt sand and you know, one of the scenes in Yellowstone, the most recent one, it's one of the sons fixing up a cabin. As I said in the piece, it looks like Home Depot, you know, but it's, it's set to country. The music's great throughout. And I'm not exactly a country Music fan, but somehow he finds country music that is like cooler. I don't know a better way to describe it. I like, I end up liking it all looking up, who's this guy? You know, it sounds kind of good, but it's. Yeah, it's very. It's a cell. There's flags everywhere. You know, it's a celebration of, of America while at the same time being dark. I don't know, it's a. It's a very weird tonal stuff that he pulls off, you know, very dark.
- [32:20]
Emma Chamberlain
And it is. That's why, that's what's Trumpian about it in that sense, which is that it is not Lee Greenwood singing God Bless the usa. It is. The USA is at risk and at threat of no longer being what made it great. And that is the larger, largest subject of the Taylor Sheridan project.
- [32:42]
Rick Marin
And you know, you mentioned the women too. Like I've heard complaint, always a misogynist because you'll have sort of. There's definitely sexualized scenes with very attractive women. At the same time, most of these women are absolute tough as nails, you know, happy to chew out some other guy who thinks he's tougher and absolutely demolish them in a courtroom or in a bar or wherever.
- [33:06]
Emma Chamberlain
You know, these women smash a bottle over their head.
- [33:09]
Rick Marin
I mean, they're very strong. He has no problem with strong women. And then, you know, in terms of who watches it, I was, I just yesterday walking my dog and I ran into this guy. He's like a dog walking friend and he's definitely, he's a music producer. He's definitely very traditionally liberal and we're not talking about it. He's like, I started watching the show Landman. It's like, it's really good. I'm like, yeah. And, and I could, I could tell, like he didn't really agree with the thing, but. But he was even with, for instance, he mentioned the scene where Billy Bob Thornton rants about what's wrong with clean energy. And he was like, well, even if I don't agree, like, I have to made me think about it, you know, like, like, so, yeah, you know, like even if you aren't necessarily on board, he's doing it in a way that maybe will bring more people in, you know, at least listen to it. Because again, because also because it's so.
- [33:58]
Emma Chamberlain
Dramatically compelling and the idea that you want, if you're going to establish a dramatic situation, a dramatic situation being people are working in these oil fields and they're not Exxon. You know, they're not mobile. They're not the big guys. They're rich and they're tough, but they are again, very trumpish. They are the people who are down in the ground trying to get the oil out of the ground. They're not in a boardroom. I mean there are scenes in boardrooms, but that is the point that the wealth comes from the land and their character comes from their exploitation of and love of the land at the same time. And there's class tensions. Landman is rife with class tensions between Mexican Americans and some rich white kids who seem to be slumming and various other sorts of things. And Mayor of Kingstown is a show entirely about a kind of town that is bubbling on the verge of race war because half the town lives inside of seven prisons at the same time.
- [35:21]
Rick Marin
Everybody seems to travel by private jet. Yeah, Taylor shirt like so in la, man. But also in Lioness, this CIA exclusively private jets.
- [35:34]
Emma Chamberlain
Yeah, well, I mean, let, listen, let's not, let's not go too far. I mean, you know, you know, if you, if you can get a private jet, you should have one. That's a very important.
- [35:45]
Rick Marin
Speaking of which, we should also mention that Taylor Sheridan has gotten so rich off of this that he bought the largest, I think cattle ranch in the country. 250,000 acres in Texas called the 666, which he's. 6666.
- [36:02]
Emma Chamberlain
Four sixes. Yeah.
- [36:03]
Rick Marin
Not Hispanic, but four sixes Branch legendary ranch in Texas. I guess maybe it was in trouble. He comes in and buy and, and now he's doing a show there, set there and he's already promoting the merch. Yeah, someone was drinking four sixes vodka on Yellowstone yet like so he's done quite well, but still manages. Yeah. To stay in touch with, I think, this sense of the average person and what they want to see, certainly the kind of entertainment they want to consume.
- [36:34]
Emma Chamberlain
I mean, the single most disturbing aspect of him for us, for you and me and anybody who writes for a living, is that this guy writes 90% of these shows. So again, we're talking about Yellowstone, 1883, 1923. Mayor of Kingstowne, Tulsa, King Landman, Lioness. That's seven shows and he has bylines on the scripts of 90% of them. He wrote the entirety of Landman himself. He wrote the, has written almost the entirety of Yellowstone himself. It is freakish, his productivity.
- [37:16]
Rick Marin
You know, I, I, I met a woman who was a writer on the show and I didn't ask her in the time how that works because you know, there are, there have been writers like this Aaron Sorkin, West Wing. He'd hire all these fancy, high priced TV writers and they became glorified researchers. You would deliver him five pages on, here's a congressional subcommittee, and then he would just do it himself. Yeah. And David Kelly is another, another one like that. There are these freaks of nature who can pull it off. I mean, I. So is he really writing all these. I mean, it's. If he is, it's, it's astounding. The.
- [37:54]
Emma Chamberlain
He is.
- [37:54]
Rick Marin
I don't know how he does it.
- [37:55]
Emma Chamberlain
You. He is. You can sort of tell that he is because particularly I think on Landman, the voice is very distinctive and, and, and in a weird way, every character kind of sounds like every other character, which means that it's not like he's farming out different things to different people, which is how you would ordinarily write a soap. It's like you write for this character, I'm writing for that character. We'll merge the three plot lines and put them together and we'll see who puts whose name on the script. Anyway. That's just one of the reasons that you can, you can say that this is his unified vision. That's a very hard thing to say in television.
- [38:36]
Rick Marin
Yeah.
- [38:37]
Emma Chamberlain
You know, because so many, there are so many cooks, you know, in the kitchen.
- [38:42]
Rick Marin
Yeah. I mean, who could do that? Eddie Direct. Right.
- [38:46]
Emma Chamberlain
And I think he directed most of Landman also. So it's. Yeah, he's a, he's a.
- [38:52]
Rick Marin
But I don't think, I think you would have a hard time finding another writer who could or would be able to, you know, crank out one of those long disquisitions on what's wrong with America. You know, and it's him. You know, he's, he's the only guy who could or I think would do that. Right.
- [39:11]
Emma Chamberlain
But it's very rare that you get a popular culture figure who does seem to crystallize a given cultural moment. I mean, in the late 60s, early 70s, it would said that, you know, Easy Rider represented some kind of fundamental change in America's understanding of itself or how young people wanted to look at America on screen, where the Cosby show changed the way everybody perceived African American life in the United States and made Barack Obama's rise possible several decades later. And all of that. And you can really say that about. People have had a very great deal of difficulty trying to reckon with what it is that made Trump's rise fall and re rise possible. And it's odd, but Suggestive that this is one of the very few places in which you can say, I don't think that this would have happened at a different time in a different place or that Trump could have restored himself without the kind of attitudes that are represented on these shows that then are ballasted by these audiences. And they're bigger than we even think, because I'm talking about the number of people watch them every week. So then they're watched every week like this, and then they go on streaming services, and then they go on other streaming services. And by the time Yellowstone is through with its run, 100 million people will have watched episodes of Yellowstone, not 15 million people. And, I mean, voters know, but.
- [40:58]
Rick Marin
Right. It's the vibe shift, as I just read and described as. And he was ahead of it, though, because, you know. Yeah, sure. Now, last couple. Okay, but when did Yellowstone premiere?
- [41:10]
Emma Chamberlain
2017. 2017.
- [41:12]
Rick Marin
Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, now, I guess you could argue. Okay, well, Trump was in office then, but. But, yeah, he is. He's definitely. Yeah. I think he's the. The only person out there who is really in entertainment who's really capitalized so far.
- [41:28]
Emma Chamberlain
You could have said, like that those first couple of episodes of the. When Roseanne returned to the Roseanne show and had this, like, huge triumph with these shows and then went crazy and got fired off her own show because she started calling, you know, Obama administration officials monkeys and things like that. And then Right. Somehow, whatever that was, that lightning in a bottle, that world of people who had not been served by American culture for so long. But you can see it in other places. You can see it in, like, the comedy of Shane Gillis or the comedy of Nate Bargazi or these guys that Bill. Bill Burr, these guys who come out of nowhere. And what they are saying is, I am sick and tired of being told I'm not allowed to speak my mind about the things that I find so annoying. And that Taylor Sheridan has no comic sensibility whatsoever. I would say he's one of the heaviest spirited writers that we've ever seen.
- [42:30]
Rick Marin
Although I will say Billy Bob's is pretty funny in Landmark.
- [42:33]
Emma Chamberlain
Well, he is funny because he is funny.
- [42:36]
Rick Marin
Someone said he's just doing bad Santa.
- [42:39]
Emma Chamberlain
But I don't think that's right. Because the whole point about him is that nothing, including his crazy wife or a terrible thing that happens on his rant or whatever, he is unflappable. And the reason that he can be the landman that he is is that he has seen everything. Everything bad, everything awful. Everything terrible, everything good. And he knows just three hours from now there's going to be something, another mess he's going to have to go clean up and he's just not going to get too upset about anything.
- [43:11]
Rick Marin
The, the Shane Gillis comparison, the comedian Shane Gillis comparison is, is interesting. He had a big Netflix special and he has this show, TV show now. But he's a guy who's, he traveled in liberal circles, right? Like he lived in Brooklyn. He, he was a teacher in, in Europe. Like he, in the same way as Sheridan, they know that world. You know, they're not just, you know, rubes coming out of nowhere with these backward ideas. They, they've traveled in those worlds and in a way maybe allow has allowed them to speak to not only their own people but also guys like my dog walking friend, you know, in a way that will be intriguing or you know, Shane Gillis does, he's just funny. You just can't deny that he's funny. And Sheridan, you can't deny that this stuff is incredibly compelling and dramatic and fun to watch.
- [44:02]
Emma Chamberlain
Okay, so that is the anti woke king of Hollywood lets loose Taylor Sheridan shows explain how and why we got Trump again. Our cover story, you can read it at commentary.org or if you are a subscriber, of course. It will be in your mailbox by the time you hear this and you can read it and look at Taylor Sheridan's very, very attractive punum. You can see Billy Bob Thornton standing there looking great at 69 on the COVID And that is Rick Marin's chef d'oeuvre on the COVID of Commentary. So Rick, fantastic to have you on. Thrilling to be able to have a conversation here on the podcast that has gone in this direction as opposed to many others. And we will be back. This is a holiday episode, so I, I, I'm not dating it. I don't know what day it's going to run. I don't know whether we're going to be back on tomorrow or whether it's a Friday. So it'll be back on a Monday, as I would ordinarily say. But I will end by saying what I always say, which is keep the candle burning.