Taylor Sheridan’s Writing: The Silence We Feel

I first saw Legends of the Fall when I was a young girl, and it did something to me. It was not just a crush or a passing favorite. It was devotion-quiet, sacred, and consuming, like a ritual I did not yet have words for. I watched it repeatedly, each viewing a pilgrimage in search of something new. Indeed, I found it, not within the unfolding plot, but in the emotions it evoked.Time itself seemed to bend and stretch around those scenes, until the final credits vanished into silence and I felt an irresistible urge to begin again, not because I’d forgotten, but because I had tasted something too exquisite to relinquish.

As the years rolled on, I became the film’s evangelist, guiding younger viewers to its aching beauty, its fierce yearning, its sacred wildness. And though I watched their first wonderment with pride, that initial, intoxicating thrill eluded me, until the day I stepped into the world of Taylor Sheridan.

In Taylor Sheridan’s writing, especially in Yellowstone, I heard the same haunting refrain: beauty clashing with brutality, hope entwined with despair, love snatched away by loss and destruction. Every note in his world is exacting, nothing wasted, nothing unearned and every moment pulses with consequence. Always, someone pays the price. His stories are elemental and epic, yet they unfold quietly through characters whose gravity pulls you into their orbit. You linger for the people, for the sacred stillness before the storm breaks.

Beth Dutton is precisely who Beth Dutton is. I’m not meant to see myself in her; I’m meant to feel the force of her presence. And I do. I remember answering friends when they asked about my favorite Game of Thrones villain: “Cersei, because who wouldn’t covet wine-soaked tyranny?” We know she’s monstrous, yet we thrill to her power. With Beth, that thrill is magnified. I long to embody her fury and freedom, seven days a week, twice on Sundays.

Perhaps it isn’t just who she is, but the unbridled license she commands-the right to scorch the earth that scars her. Most of us lack such indulgence. We lack the freedom to unleash our wrath and watch the world burn in response. This is Sheridan’s triumph: his characters are instruments in his symphony, forged and then released by a master’s hand. When their stories fade, what lingers the feeling they left inside you.