Taylor Sheridan is one of those masterminds of masterminds, wracking his brain down to the core to find out the next best storyline for his Yellowstone universe and all the spin-offs attached to it. Not only has he delivered some of the most epic tales through all of his projects, but he has also set multiple records and won many star-studded accolades for the same.
However, the genius was pretty much at his wits’ end the studios quite literally made an impossible demand for one of his most famous spin-offs, 1883. But what’s worth commending is that, despite knowing that fulfilling this demand was close to impossible, Sheridan still managed to find a solution to it by bringing the next classic spin-off in line to life, 1923.
Taylor Sheridan Had to Fulfill This Impossible Demand for 1883
[Warning: This article contains major spoilers related to 1883‘s series finale ahead. Don’t read further than this if you haven’t watched the series yet but are planning to watch it.]
As the fans who have watched the Isabel May-starrer series must already know, no prominent character from the saga manages to make it out alive, with each of them succumbing to their brutal perishable fates and losing their life. However, the studios didn’t seem to “digest” this fact.
In an interview with Deadline, showrunner Sheridan shared the same as he said:
“The story I heard is Bob Bakish watched it and said, ‘Wait a minute, she dies! They all die? What do we do in season two?’ I said, there is no season two.”
However, instead of accepting this fate for the characters, the studios instead put an impossible request in front of Taylor Sheridan: Figure out a season 2 about “how Sam Elliott survived his suicide” because “we already picked it up”. In fact, they even had a meeting for the same!
Since, “by the very nature of the term [suicide], it’s not something survivable, and who would want to see that?” Sheridan asked to take a different approach instead. And for this, he “studied Montana’s history and the history of the world.”
Yet, even after around eight months had passed and the studios kept going on and on about “when are we going to get a script?” Sheridan was still as clueless as ever.
“I said, I don’t know. Everyone is dead. I don’t know how to write the next season of this damn thing,” shared Sheridan.
But after a lot of constant history hunting and “finding things,” the writer-cum-producer-cum-director-cum actor finally figured out a way to please the studios, even if it wasn’t the direct continuation of the Tim McGraw-starrer: 1923, i.e. the story that partly continues the events of its 2021 prequel.
Taylor Sheridan Finds These Spin-Offs’ Connection to Yellowstone “Intriguing”
This Harrison Ford-starrer sequel to 1883 (and the prequel to the superhit five-seasons series where Sheridan himself starred as Travis Wheatley) inevitably takes off perfectly from the events that the Dutton family had to go through to defend their land through the period of The Great Depression.
And despite not being directly connected, it links to all the events that happened in the original Kevin Costner-starrer series as well as in its prequel. That being said, this very fact about the universe he has brought to life truly entrances the 53-year-old mastermind to the core.
As Sheridan himself admitted during the same interview:
“It’s the one great thing about the Dutton family; you can skip generations and put them in all these unique situations, and it has nothing to do with Yellowstone, nothing to do with 1883, and yet it’s tethered completely to them, but they’re all standalones. That’s what I find so intriguing about it.”
Well, you’re not the only one to feel that way, Cowboy, for we share mutual feelings with you on that!
You can stream Yellowstone on Peacock and 1883 and 1923 on Paramount+.
