Yellowstone follows John Dutton (Kevin Costner), the patriarch of the largest contiguous ranch in the United States, as he battles developers, a Native American reservation, and political adversaries who want his land. The series is a neo-Western that uses the form to examine contemporary American anxieties — about land ownership, legacy, economic displacement, and what it means to defend a way of life that the modern world is slowly erasing.

The show’s commercial success defied every conventional industry assumption. Premiering on Paramount Network — a rebrand of Spike TV with no established prestige identity — it built an audience entirely through word of mouth and repeat viewing, eventually becoming the most-watched cable drama in American television history. Its audience skewed rural, older, and politically conservative in ways that the streaming-era television industry was structurally unprepared to serve, and Yellowstone became a cultural phenomenon by serving an audience that had been largely ignored.

The Kevin Costner situation — the reported conflict between star and showrunner over filming schedules, during which Costner was working on his own Western film project Horizon — became one of the most covered stories in television in 2023. Season 5 Part 2 resolved without Costner’s John Dutton, and the series concluded on its own terms. The ending was controversial but demonstrated that the Yellowstone universe — as Sheridan had always maintained — was larger than any single character.

1883 is the origin story of the Dutton family, following James Dutton (Tim McGraw) and Margaret Dutton (Faith Hill) as they join a wagon train traveling from Fort Worth, Texas to Montana in 1883, seeking land and a new life. The journey is narrated by their daughter Elsa (Isabel May), whose voice provides the show’s elegiac, almost literary tone. Sam Elliott plays Shea Brennan, a Pinkerton agent scarred by Civil War and personal loss who guides the train.

1883 is arguably Sheridan’s finest writing in the television medium. The show does not romanticise the westward migration — the trail is brutal, fatal, and relentless, and Sheridan treats the violence and death with documentary honesty. Isabel May’s narration as Elsa gives the series a quality closer to literary fiction than genre Western, and the ten-episode arc is structured with the compression and inevitability of a short novel. Sam Elliott’s performance is one of the best in the Western genre’s history.

The series drew massive Paramount+ subscriber numbers upon premiere and confirmed that the Yellowstone universe could sustain high-quality prequel material. It was nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, an unusual achievement for a streaming prequel spinoff.

1923 focuses on a new generation of Duttons — Jacob Dutton (Harrison Ford) and his wife Cara (Helen Mirren) — as they navigate the harshest period in the ranch’s history: drought, Prohibition, encroaching cattle barons, and the lead-up to the Great Depression. The series marks Harrison Ford’s first major television role and Helen Mirren’s first American television series, and both deliver career-best small-screen performances.

Where 1883 focused on a journey, 1923 is a siege drama — the Duttons defending what the previous generation built against enemies on every side. Sheridan uses the Prohibition era to examine how institutional violence (government, industry, competing land interests) targets individuals and families who resist assimilation into corporate-scale agriculture. The show also threads a parallel storyline involving a young Native American woman, Teonna Rainwater (Aminah Nieves), whose boarding school experiences provide one of Sheridan’s most direct engagements with Indigenous American history and trauma.

Set at the historic Four Sixes Ranch in Guthrie, Texas — one of the most famous cattle operations in American history, founded in 1870 and spanning nearly 350,000 acres — 6666 was teased throughout Yellowstone’s run via the character Jimmy Hurdstrom (Jefferson White), who is sent to the Four Sixes as part of the show’s recurring storyline. The ranch itself became a location and recurring element in Yellowstone, building audience familiarity before the spinoff was formally announced.

The series will focus on the contemporary ranch operations, the cowboys who work the land, and the culture of the Texas cattle industry. Sheridan purchased a stake in the actual Four Sixes Ranch, blurring the line between personal investment and creative project in a way consistent with his broader approach to authenticity. The show has been positioned as a companion to the Yellowstone universe but set in Texas rather than Montana, providing geographic and tonal contrast.

As of 2025, 6666 remains in active development. No premiere date has been confirmed.

A further prequel in the Yellowstone universe, set during the Second World War and following a generation of Duttons navigating the ranch during the war years. The project would bridge the gap between 1923 (covering the early-to-mid 20th century) and the post-war generation that would eventually produce John Dutton’s parents.

Sheridan has spoken about his interest in how the ranch survived successive American crises — the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the Second World War — and 1944 represents the most recent announced extension of that multigenerational narrative. The WWII setting allows Sheridan to explore the ranch in a period when many of its men were abroad, placing women and older family members at the centre of its survival. No casting or production timeline has been confirmed.

Mayor of Kingstown co-stars Jeremy Renner as Mike McLusky, the unofficial power broker in a fictional Michigan city whose entire economy depends on its prison complex. Mike navigates between incarcerated gang leaders, corrupt prison staff, law enforcement, and city politicians — brokering truces, extracting concessions, and preventing violence through sheer proximity to every faction simultaneously. He is not elected, has no official authority, and holds power entirely through relationships and reputation.

The show is Sheridan’s most overtly political, examining the prison-industrial complex, systemic racism in incarceration, and the way that entire communities become economically dependent on carceral infrastructure. Its tone is darker and more urban than the Yellowstone universe — closer to The Wire in its institutional analysis, though more plot-driven and genre-inflected in execution. Hugh Dillon, who co-created the series, also appears as a series regular, and the show has continued to develop following Jeremy Renner’s near-fatal snowplow accident in January 2023, from which he recovered to return to production.

Tulsa King follows Dwight Manfredi (Sylvester Stallone), a New York mafia capo who, after serving 25 years in prison for taking the fall for his boss, is unceremoniously exiled to Tulsa, Oklahoma and told to establish a criminal operation there. The premise generates its tension from the collision between Manfredi’s old-world mob sensibility and the utterly foreign culture of the American heartland.

It is Sheridan’s lightest, most commercially accessible work — a crime comedy as much as a drama — and Stallone’s performance has been widely praised as a late-career reinvention. The show is the one project in the Sheridan portfolio that most clearly demonstrates his range: the same writer who crafted the austere tragedy of 1883 also writes Dwight Manfredi learning to navigate a marijuana dispensary in Oklahoma with warmth, wit, and genuine comedic instinct.

Special Ops: Lioness follows CIA operative Joe (Zoe Saldana), who runs the Lioness Program — a real intelligence initiative in which female operatives are embedded as personal contacts of high-value terrorist targets, building relationships over months to gain operational access. The show draws on Sheridan’s established interest in institutional violence, moral compromise under operational pressure, and the human cost of covert action.

Zoe Saldana’s Joe is one of Sheridan’s most complex protagonists — a woman who is professionally exceptional and personally fractured, holding together a marriage and family while conducting operations that require total psychological immersion in other identities. Nicole Kidman plays her handler and institutional superior, and Morgan Freeman appears as the U.S. Secretary of State. The show has been praised for its action sequences and for Saldana’s performance, and has attracted Sheridan’s largest female audience.

Lawmen: Bass Reeves dramatises the life of Bass Reeves (1838–1910), a formerly enslaved man who became the first Black U.S. Marshal west of the Mississippi River and one of the most effective lawmen in the history of the American frontier, reportedly arresting more than 3,000 felons and killing 14 outlaws in self-defence over his career. David Oyelowo’s performance was widely described as one of the finest of his career.

The series was created by Chad Feehan rather than Sheridan directly, but operates within the Sheridan/Paramount+ production infrastructure and shares the universe’s sensibility. It represents Sheridan’s willingness, as executive producer, to facilitate stories about the American West that his own background would not naturally generate. The show received Emmy recognition for Oyelowo’s performance and was praised as a significant and long-overdue historical dramatisation.