'Lioness' Shows Why Taylor Sheridan Is a Good Writer

It came out in June, but I finally got the chance to listen to Bill Simmons’ interview with Taylor Sheridan the other day. It’s pretty amazing — and a bit inspiring — to hear the extraordinary confidence with which Sheridan carries himself. No matter how you feel about his shows or his opinions — and there are some bad ones among both — you have to admire what he’s achieved by refusing to compromise his artistic vision. He believes in himself to the degree that self-doubt doesn’t seem to exist for him anymore. He does things his way, and for the past eight years since Yellowstone premiered, it’s worked every time.

It was really cool to hear him talk about one of the primary stylistic differentiators that has made him so successful — his allergy to exposition. He is a devotee of one of the basic rules of storytelling that everyone gets taught in middle school English class but people apparently forget when they become professional screenwriters: show, don’t tell. Here’s how he puts it:

“[People who aren’t as good at writing as me] couldn’t figure out an intelligent way in the story to show me something, so they just had this character say it. All these Marvel movies do it ad nauseam, where they will just have information dumps that you have to follow to get to the action rather than actually moving plot with action. And then the other thing that I did was basically find the most interesting way to say anything.”

There’s a scene in the first episode of the new season of his spy thriller Lioness that shows this ethos in action. It’s a short scene between CIA officials Nicole Kidman and Michael Kelly where she brings him up to speed on what’s happening with a Ukrainian spy that approached a member of the team she oversees with supposed high-value intelligence — but we don’t know this as the scene starts. This information is revealed through realistic dialogue that reveals what’s happening without doing Marvel-style exposition.

He walks into a conference room where she’s sitting watching a live feed from a drone camera. “Where’s the park?” he asks. “Georgetown campus,” she answers. And just like that, the scene starts to unfold in an interesting and distinctive way. These people are colleagues, so they aren’t going to talk to each other in a stilted way, they’re going to talk like they understand each other. He doesn’t need her to explain what’s happening from the beginning — he already knows the broad strokes, he just needs her to fill in the details. The characters don’t talk like they’re on a TV show. They’re talking to each other, not the audience.

Kidman explains how this spy found them, then says “She’s FISU, worked her way into Russia’s SVR 2018.”. Sheridan is not dumping information on you, he expects you to be smart enough to understand the information as it’s presented. I am not. I had to rewind this line and put subtitles on to understand what she was saying, and then google what FISU and SVR are.

“So what does she have?” he asks.

“Pretty curious about that myself,” she says, then starts moving her eyes over what’s happening on the screen for a second longer than a different show would have held the look. Then boom, scene over, and we cut to a more dynamic scene in the park where Zoe Saldaña’s team stages a ruse to meet with the spy in public without drawing attention.

In this scene, he couldn’t get around having to tell us something, but he told us as little as he had to in order to move us quickly to the action, and did it in a way that forces us to watch more closely instead of getting bored and tuning out. I’m sure there are TV watchers who like it when characters just summarize what’s going on for them, but I like it when shows make me work a little bit harder. To me, Lioness is Sheridan’s best show, and writing like this is why.