Taylor Sheridan sold America on ‘Yellowstone.’ Now he’s promoting the Four Sixes brand | Opinion

“Yellowstone” is coming back.

The new “6666” is on its way.

And Taylor Sheridan is writing and producing up a storm — and selling all the Four Sixes Beef and Four Sixes Beer he can — to help pay off his purchase of the Burnett family’s legendary Texas ranch.

A downtown Fort Worth businessmen’s club heard Sheridan say all that and more Wednesday, welcoming the Paschal High School and Tarrant County College alumnus who somehow went to Hollywood but stayed normal.

“Hollywood’s a terrible place,” Sheridan said during a 30-minute talk to an Exchange Club of Fort Worth luncheon in the historic Fort Worth Club.

“My business can lend itself toward the most superficial rewards, and what they cherish is what’s superficial or trendy. It’s not a good place.”

Sheridan was explaining why he lives in rural Parker County instead of Hollywood.

But he also might have been describing his career mission: to tell the real stories of ranching, oil drilling, history and lore to an America that loves his shows, despite West and East Coast screenwriters and critics who don’t get them.

Sheridan, 53, an actor and Oscar-nominated screenwriter for 20 years before the sudden success of “Yellowstone,” said he started writing because “no one was telling the kind of stories I was telling, and there came a real appetite for it.”

I’ll say.

Currently, “Yellowstone” is drawing 5 million viewers per episode.

“Almost every screenwriter is from Harvard, Yale, USC, AFI — one of two major urban centers,” he said, referring to the University of Southern California and the American Film Institute, both in Los Angeles.

“That’s the world they live in. They can write about that experience. But that experience doesn’t really appeal to most of America.”

Sheridan joked about his Fort Worth years, describing his graduation from Paschal as “a truce — it was like, OK, we’re going to give you this piece of paper, and you get out of here” and calling himself “a junior college guy [from TCC-Northeast] that came along and found a niche.”

But at the family’s Bosque County ranch, he also gained an education in the rarely told story of Texas’ diverse cultural history,

Now, he is America’s best history teacher, telling the often-complicated story of the American Indians, the Black and Latino American cowboys, and European settlements such as the Norwegians around Clifton and Cranfills Gap, the Germans in the Hill Country and the Italians in Montague County.

These early European settlers didn’t speak English.

“They did not know what a rattlesnake was,” he said.

“Some had never even seen a horse. But they said, ‘We’ll deal with the rattlesnakes. We’ll figure out how to get across the river.’ ... Opportunity drew them. Ninety percent came here out of desperation.”

That’s the kind of story that has made Sheridan sort of an official Texas interpreter. He explains us to the rest of the world.

He’ll do that again in “Land Man,” a future series about the oil patch.

“People have no idea how the oil business works,” he said.

We built an entire civilization on oil, he said, until “people decided that’s bad and we can’t do that anymore.”

Sheridan’s 6666 Ranch is part of Texas’ oil legacy.

Now, he and partners hope to make it profitable selling branded merchandise. For example, beef sales directly to restaurants have grown from $3,000 a day to $100,000, he said.

His goal is simple: “We are selling the [ranch] brand ... to conserve the land.”

He’s also conserving the history of Texas.