What Taylor Sheridan's 'Yellowstone' Universe Gets Right About Male Friendship
There are many things that people can say about the writing and the tone of Taylor Sheridan's various TV shows. The creator of Yellowstone, Landman, 1923, and many other popular Westerns, as well as many other popular dramas (like Lioness) often tells interviewers that he doesn't really care what his critics have to say about his writing style. On June 29, 2026, Sheridan told Bill Simmons: "The critics and me – I don’t care what they think, and it annoys the s--- out of them that I don't care." The TV creator is rarely far away from the news, but even as some may critique his specific writing of female characters, nobody can really deny that he knows how to write a bromance.
Here are the three specific things that Taylor Sheridan's universe gets right about male friendship, all of which help to explain why his shows are so popular. And, for the men who love these shows, these are touchstones that you can return to, time and again.
Your friendship is allowed to be rocky
Whether it's Tommy and Monty in Landman or Jacob Dutton and Sheriff McDowell in 1923, a lot of the friendships in the Yellowstone universe are inherently impefect. Having fights with your bros is normal, and in fact, if you don't have a rocky friendship, are you really even friends?
Throughout all of Taylor Sheridan's shows, and even the most recent spinoffs, conflict between male friends, or even male frenemies is all about recongizing the messiness of those relationships in the first place.
Less is more
In Yellowstone, the bunkhouse boys manage to have a bond that doesn't require a lot of words. Ditto Rip and Lloyd, also in the original Yellowstone. Not a lot of words are required between these kinds of men, but when they need to say the exact thing they need from another man—like when Rip asks Lloyd to be his best man—they manage to do it.
What Sheridan's writing, and his charcters do, is provide a nice mirror for certain kinds of men. You don't have to be a cowboy or even be remotely interested in Westerns to reconginze that some of these moments are perfect reflections of how men often do communicate. Do we need to say more? In Sheridan's world, sometimes, the answer is...nope!
Find common ground
CBS/Paramount+
Even in the Yellowstone spinoffs not written by Sheridan, most recently,Dutton Ranch and Marshals, there's one major theme: Even if you've got beef, you have to figure out how to meet in the middle. In Dutton Ranch, Rip slowly warms to Zachariah, after realizing the ex-con shares his basic values. It's not that Rip and Zachariah are overtly friends, but over time, we realize that these two have figured out the thing that they agree on: Doing an honest day's job.
On the otherside of the coin, in Marshals, a lot of the storylines were about old friends trying to find new common ground. Cal and Kayce had a few dust-ups in Marshals Season 1, but as actor Logan Marshall-Green pointed out to Men's Journal, the friendship there was connected, partly because these two men were "carrying a secret forward." But also, that Cal has no "choice at this point to trust Kayce."
This idea might be the most obvious notion in the the Sheridan-verse male bromances. Ernest Hemingway once said: "The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them." And that's the biggest male friendship notion in all these Yellowstone, and Yellowstone adjacent shows: Trust is a choice.
Yellowstone streams on Peacock. Dutton Ranch, Marshals, 1923, 1883, and Landman all stream on Paramount+.
source https://www.mensjournal.com/entertainment/taylor-sheridan-male-friendship-yellowstone-landman
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