Taylor Sheridan Weighs In On WGA Staffing Demands: “For Me, Writers Rooms Haven’t Worked”
deadline.comTaylor Sheridan has revealed where he stands on the WGA’s minimum staffing demands on episode TV: It’s a non-starter for the former-actor-turned prolific scribe, who wrote all the episodes for Yellowstone, 1883 and 1923, along with the upcoming Lioness. “The freedom of the artist to create must be unfettered,” Sheridan told The Hollywood Reporter in a lengthy interview. “If they tell me, ‘You’re going to have to write a check for $540,000 to four people to sit in a room that you never have to meet,’ then that’s between the studio and the guild.
But if I have to check in creatively with others for a story I’ve wholly built in my brain, that would probably be the end of me telling TV stories.” Before the WGA launched its strike, it had proposed minimum staffing for episodic TV writers rooms.
For pre-greenlight rooms, it proposed “minimum staff of six writers, including four Writer-Producers.” For post-greenlight rooms, it proposed “one writer per episode up to six episodes, then one additional writer required for each two episodes after six, up to a maximum of 12 writers.
Example: eight episodes requires seven writers including four Writer-Producers; 10 episodes requires eight writers including five Writer-Producers.” This doesn’t jibe with how Sheridan likes to operate his dramas. “My stories have a very simple plot that is driven by the characters as opposed to characters driven by a plot — the antithesis of the way television is normally modeled,” continued Sheridan. “I’m really interested in the dirty of the relationships in literally every scene.
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