Thursday, December 12, 2024

Taylor Sheridan inserts himself into his shows?

From a delightful interview with Kathryn VanArendonk in the consistently great Dinner Party newsletter about his television empire (I've never watched his shows, just gonna leave it to my imagination):

I started watching this recent run of Yellowstone because I knew about the Costner drama, and I knew this might be the end of the series (this is still unclear, although it seems very likely), and I wanted to see how Sheridan was going to wrap up this thing that’s become such an unavoidable cultural behemoth. I had a feeling it would not be a deft, surprising end. Even still, when Taylor Sheridan shows up as his character Travis with a new girlfriend character (played by Bella Hadid!) sitting fondly behind him while he schools a naked woman named Mackenzie on how to play strip poker, I did wonder if we have all somehow stumbled into an alternate universe set inside Sheridan’s imagination? Or whether anyone at Paramount had even seen this episode before it went up? The not one but two strip-poker scenes that Travis of course wins, the pool party, the long sequence where he does tricks on a horse while Bella Hadid looks on with lust in her eyes … I’m not joking, it is one of the worst episodes of television I have ever seen. In my life.

...

There is so much spon, once you start looking for it. Yellowstone has been one-third car commercial for at least the last two seasons, and although it becomes increasingly hilarious to watch all the footage of Beth driving past a mountain range in a Bentley with a prominently visible brand on the front, at least that’s the sort of spon we can all recognize as basic TV economics these days. It’s the Sheridan-specific spon that’s so truly, boldly American.

 



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