It was written when, in 2020, Paramount Global (then ViacomCBS) licensed the Yellowstone streaming rights to Peacock.
Taylor Sheridan, an actor turned western-writing juggernaut, is bailing from the plains of Paramount (comma, a Skydance Corporation!) for the (money-)greener pastures of NBCUniversal. Sheridan has inked a film deal with NBCU, the home to studios like Universal Pictures and Focus Features, that begins in 2026. His current TV contract will keep him with Paramount through 2028.
It is Sheridan’s personal manifest-destiny to bring his sensibilities directly to NBCUniversal — especially to its streaming platform, Peacock, the unlikely home to Sheridan (and Paramount’s) biggest show, Yellowstone.
Yellowstone debuted in 2018, two years years before Peacock was even a thing. Yellowstone even predated the 2019 re-merging of CBS and Viacom, which formed the company that in 2022 was rebranded as Paramount Global. The smash-hit series also predated Paramount+ (2021), but certainly not its predecessor CBS All Access (2014).
In 2020, NBCU secured the Yellowstone streaming rights for its fledgling streamer. By then, Yellowstone was averaging a few-million viewers per episode, quite good for basic cable (Nielsen did not at the time measure streaming viewership), but not the runaway freight train it would become. If it was “quite good for basic cable,” and it was, it was incredible for Paramount Network — the former Spike TV that, in its new iteration, was anything but a household name. By its season three finale, Yellowstone had replaced AMC’s The Walking Dead as the top series on cable television.
Seeing the error of its ways, Paramount would go on to order roughly 100 Yellowstone spinoffs, sequels and prequels, hoarding all of the multi-platform rights for itself. The Yellowstone universe has (or soon will have) 1923, 1883 spinoffs, 1944, The Dutton Ranch, The Madison, Y: Marshals and maybe 6666. The prolific Sheridan also more than dabbles outside the Dutton-family ranch gates with Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Lioness and Landman.
The good news here is that Paramount Skydance keeps all of that, present and future. It also gets the next two-plus years of whatever the prolific Sheridan’s brain comes up with — Paramount will reap what he sows.
Paramount Global became “Paramount, a Skydance Corporation” earlier this year when billionaire David Ellison purchased control of the company, merging it with his Skydance. Around the same time, Sheridan and Paramount partnered on a new studio in Texas.
Paramount didn’t originally sign over the Yellowstone streaming rights just to be nice. They got paid, though certainly not what would soon become the series’ fair market value — the show’s ceiling was unforeseeable when the paperwork was signed.
Instead of ponying up whatever Sheridan conceived to be his 2025 FMV, the young Paramount Skydance has elected to cut huge checks to the South Park guys and the Stranger Things guys. Not only is Sheridan expensive, his shows are too. When Chris McCarthy was in charge of Paramount Global’s streaming and cable and Keyes Hill-Edgar was his chief operating officer, Sheridan got what he wanted: total control, unlimited greenlights and huge budgets. Ellison is not McCarthy, and word is the two have clashed.
All the while, NBCUniversal was waiting with the Brinks wagon — when you’re a cowboy, sometimes you step in shit.
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