There is a particular kind of disappointment reserved for things that were genuinely great before they failed. Game of Thrones at its peak — roughly seasons one through four, with season six as a late rally — was the most ambitious television drama ever produced. It did things no prestige show had attempted: it killed its protagonist in the first season, it made political consequence feel real and permanent, it treated its audience as adults capable of holding complexity.

Watch enough Taylor Sheridan and a pattern crystallizes with the inevitability of a Wyoming sunset: same stoic patriarch, same decorative women, same moral universe in which violence is the only honest language. Yellowstone, 1883, 1923, Tulsa King, Lioness, Mayor of Kingstown — they are not separate shows. They are one long argument Sheridan is having with himself, dressed in different period costumes and distributed across every major streaming platform simultaneously.