The 10 Worst Written Characters in Taylor Sheridan Shows, Ranked

Taylor Sheridan has made his own subgenre of neo-Westerns with shows like Yellowstone, Landman, Lioness, Tulsa King, and Mayor of Kingstown. But for all his success, one criticism follows him everywhere. He writes characters who feel less like people and more like mouthpieces, delivering dialogue so cheesy that it memes itself.

The loudest complaints concern his women. The female characters in Sheridan’s universe are always victims of traumatizing events, with accusations being leveled against him for torturing his women characters.

To be clear, this list is not about the actors. Every performer here is doing their best with what’s on the page. However, the writing on the page is the problem, and here are the ten worst ones in his shows.

10 Travis Wheatley Exists to Feed Taylor Sheridan’s Ego

Taylor Sheridan cast himself as a horse trader and then handed that horse trader some of the show’s most indulgent screen time. Travis Wheatley exists to explain cowboy culture to everyone, win every argument, and look effortlessly cool doing it. Entire stretches of Season 5 stop the Dutton story cold so Travis can run a horse sale or crack wise at the rodeo.

The show even gave him a supermodel girlfriend, played by Bella Hadid, in a subplot nobody asked for. A working writers’ room would have flagged this. Sheridan should have kept his character as a minor fixture who appears in a scene or two.

9 Emma Laird’s Iris Is Sheridan’s Worst Damsel in Distress

Emma Laird‘s Iris arrives in Kingstown as a trafficked woman used as bait, and three seasons later she’s still mostly defined by what men do to her. Sheridan puts her through beatings, coercion, and constant threat, then rarely lets her act on her own terms.

Her scenes with Milo and later with Mike frustrate viewers with her lack of agency. Even her rare victories are handed to her. Emma Laird plays the fear beautifully, but fear is nearly the whole character. Laird’s performance could’ve been saved if Sheridan gave her at least one plan of her own.

8 Spencer Dutton’s Story Arc Was Laughably Bad

1923 had a ticking clock, as the Yellowstone ranch was collapsing, and Spencer was supposed to be the only one who could save it. However, Sheridan spent two seasons keeping him roughly ten thousand miles away. Some believed that Sheridan intended this to be Spencer’s Odyssey, but the obstacles appeared purely to stretch the runtime.

He finally arrives in the final episode, and the payoff lasts only minutes. Brandon Sklenar carried an entire show on travel montages. Sheridan should have gotten Spencer home by mid-Season 2, and he should’ve given him a happy ending on the Alex romance arc.

7 Beth Dutton Wastes a Great Actress in a Terribly Written Role

In both Yellowstone and Dutton Ranch, Beth is written as a weapon and a bad one at that. Beth is shown to be destroying everyone around her with viciously quotable lines. She threatens a stranger in a bar, humiliates a co-worker, torches a corporate rival, and the show treats each as a triumph. However, the only one she ends up destroying is herself.

Her trauma is explained through one flashback and then used as permanent justification. Kelly Reilly is magnetic enough to make it work, which may be exactly why Sheridan never bothered writing further. Dutton Ranch is clearly struggling with where to take her character.

6 Isabel May’s Elsa Dutton Is a Forgettable Protagonist

Isabel May‘s Elsa Dutton narrates 1883 in a sweeping poetic voiceover that tells us exactly how to feel about everything we’re watching. But that turns out to be the character’s biggest problem. Sheridan writes her as a vessel for his own prose rather than a teenager on a brutal wagon trail. She falls in love twice in a matter of weeks, loses both men, and processes it all through the same lyrical monologue voice.

Her death is beautifully shot but emotionally pre-chewed, because the narration already told us it was coming. Elsa should have had the chance to speak through her choices, but the voiceover with a fake Southern accent just made her forgettable.

5 Sheridan Made Jamie Dutton Into Yellowstone‘s Punching Bag

Sheridan’s attempts to make Jamie Dutton into a total douchebag fall flat for one reason. No other character in the show suffered as much abuse on screen as Wes Bentley’s character did. He is disowned by John, told he was adopted, blackmailed with a murder, forced to kill his biological father, and publicly humiliated by Beth in nearly every appearance.

The show never once lets him win. Worse, his motivations flip whenever a plot needs a traitor. He betrays the family, crawls back, betrays them again, with no consistent inner logic. Bentley is great in this character, but he gets nothing to build on.

4 Piper Perabo’s Summer Is Nothing More Than a Caricature

Summer is not a character so much as a strawman built to lose arguments. She arrives as a vegan activist protesting a slaughterhouse, but is eventually embedded into the Dutton household as John Dutton’s girlfriend. Her entire job is to say something earnest about animal rights so a cowboy can shut her down with a folksy comeback.

She even ends up in a bizarre standoff with Beth that resolves in a nonsensical fistfight. Piper Perabo is a genuinely good actress stranded here with Sheridan’s god-awful writing of a liberal woman.

3 Jay Will’s Tyson Mitchell Got Worse With Each Season

Tyson Mitchell starts as a promising idea. He is a young driver in over his head, learning the business from Dwight. Then Sheridan flattens him into the comic relief who exists to be impressed. He is the one who always says something naive, and Dwight corrects him.

His attempts at toughness are usually played for laughs, and his family subplot appears and disappears without consequence. By later seasons of Tulsa King, he’s still narratively where he started, despite being promised more. Jay Will has real charisma and almost nothing to do with it.

2 Zoe Saldaña’s Joe McNamara Is Either the Abuser or the Abused

Joe McNamara is supposed to be the sharpest operative in the CIA, yet Sheridan writes her almost entirely through suffering. She’s ambushed, beaten, kidnapped, and even stripped naked by Russian agents in the latest season of Special Ops: Lioness. But when she isn’t the victim, she’s the one screaming at a recruit or coldly ordering someone into danger.

Her home life is reduced to a repeating loop of missed dinners, arguments with her husband, and a resentful teenage daughter, a subplot that resets every season without developing. Zoe Saldaña has defended Sheridan’s writing publicly, but the pattern is hard to unsee.

1 Michelle Randolph’s Ainsley Comes Off as a Ragebait Character

Michelle Randolph‘s Ainsley is a 17-year-old written to provoke, or to satisfy some weird fetish of the creator. In Landman, she wanders her father’s house in a bikini while two grown men live there, and discusses her s*x life with her dad for laughs. She delivers monologues on pronouns that feel engineered to trend on social media.

Sheridan gives her no interiority, no ambition, and no arc. Randolph has said she works hard to find the human version underneath, sharing, “I’ve worked a lot at making her likable” (via Yahoo News!). It tells you how little the script offers.

Which of these characters do you think is the worst-written? Let us know in the comments below!