Taylor Sheridan Admits He Deliberately Baits Critics — and Doesn’t Care If He Never Wins an Emmy

Both Landman and The Madison are on the Emmy ballot this year. Taylor Sheridan would like you to know he does not care.

“You’re not going to win no Emmys with me, but I’m not trying to win Emmys,” the Yellowstone creator told Bill Simmons on the June 28 episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast. “My goal is to sit somebody on their couch and move them, make them think, make them laugh, scare the shit out of them, excite them.”

But Sheridan’s indifference isn’t just about focusing on the audience. He also admits to actively messing with critics. He confessed that he sometimes writes specific storylines just to get a reaction out of them, a tactic he calls “rage baiting.”

Fair enough — except Sheridan also admitted he designs certain creative decisions to annoy critics specifically. “I’ll be the first to tell you that there are things that I do that rage bait them a bit,” he said. The example he gave: casting Demi Moore in Landman’s first season in what critics immediately flagged as an underwritten role. Sheridan let the criticism build, then had Moore’s character take over the oil company after her husband’s death. The point was not the role. The point was the long game. “The critics and me — I don’t care what they think, and it annoys the shit out of them that I don’t care,” he said. “F-k ’em.”

Sheridan’s dislike for mainstream Hollywood runs deeper than award-season acting. He described studio bosses as people who “know nothing” about storytelling — people who panic when they cannot map out a script’s story, who make up for it by demanding control over every part of the show. “What do you know about developing story? You know nothing,” he said, adding that those executives are now the ones deciding which scripts get greenlit.

When Sheridan signed his overall deal with Paramount, he did not work under those rules. He rejected it. “This is not a democracy. There’s no committee. You’re going to pay me, and you’re going to give me a bunch of money, and I’m going to deliver you these shows.”

His original instinct, going back to his early writing career, was simply to not do what everyone else was doing. His diagnosis: most writers take shortcuts because they cannot solve their own story problems. He solved his by refusing to let anyone else give feedback on the solution.

What makes Sheridan’s stance interesting — and truly unusual — is that it is not just an act against the system. He has the numbers to back his attitude. Yellowstone became the most-watched cable drama in over a decade without a single Emmy win. Landman drew over 20 million viewers in its first season. The critics followed the audience, not the other way around. When someone with that track record says he does not need the Emmy system, the claim carries weight that most showrunner defiance does not.