I don’t like this argument when other people make it. The claim that a book or a film degrades the race, that it hands ammunition to the other side, that it should have been made differently for the good of the group, has an ugly record. It was used against Richard Wright for writing Bigger Thomas, and against Zora Neale Hurston for not writing him, by critics equally sure of themselves.

Taylor Sheridan has built one of the most commercially successful empires in contemporary American television. He has also written, with remarkable consistency, the same story roughly fifteen times. This is not entirely a complaint. Repetition is the foundation of genre, and Sheridan operates squarely within a Western tradition that has always favored archetype over novelty. The problem is not that his characters resemble each other. It is that they resemble each other so precisely — same cadence, same silences, same moral geometry — that watching a new Sheridan production begins to feel less like encountering a story and more like running a diagnostic on familiar software.