Taylor Sheridan rides four hours a day before turning to showrunner duties on 1923, Landman, The Madison and Lioness, working scripts and edits from a bay built directly inside his cutting arena. The horses, he told Town & Country, come first, with the rest of the day given to “whatever the problems du jour are.” By his own account, the television work exists mainly to pay for the ranch.

Four hours in the saddle, then whatever chaos Paramount has cooked up that day. That’s the actual schedule Taylor Sheridan laid out to Town & Country, and it explains why his ranch in Weatherford looks less like a retirement plan and more like a production studio with horses. The editing bay sits inside his cutting arena, so he can walk off a training session and straight into cutting an episode of 1923 or Landman. He’s currently showrunning four series at once, on top of writing and producing several others, all funded, by his own account, by a television career he once fully intended to quit. The horses were supposed to be the reward. Instead they became the reason he never stopped working.

A life where horses come first

Taylor Sheridan may run one of the busiest production slates on television, but his mornings belong to his animals. In a recent interview with Town & Country, the Yellowstone creator laid out the pecking order of his day. “The horses come first, so you work the horses. Then I work on me, which would be going to the gym. I try to ride four hours a day,” he said. Only after the saddle and the weights does he turn to what he calls “whatever the problems du jour are.”

Balancing stories and saddles

Those daily problems are considerable. As of the 2026 TV schedule, Sheridan serves as showrunner on 4 series: 1923, Landman, The Madison and Lioness. He also writes and executive produces Mayor of Kingstown and Tulsa King, and holds executive producer credits on Marshals and Dutton Ranch.

The logistics are as unusual as the workload. Sheridan keeps an editing bay set up inside the cutting arena on his Texas ranch, so his shows get cut between horse-training sessions. Cutting, the discipline where a cowboy and horse separate cattle from a herd, is the same skill viewers saw depicted in Yellowstone, and Sheridan helps train horses in it himself.

Television pays for the ranch life

Sheridan owns 2 properties: the Bosque Ranch, devoted to horses, and the 6666 (Four Sixes) Ranch, a cattle operation in Guthrie, Texas. He told Town & Country that his television and film work helps him pay for his horses. He bought the Four Sixes in January 2022 for $330 million. “I knew that if I bought this ranch that I was not going to be quitting my day job for a while,” he said on Dale Brisby’s Rodeo Time podcast.

From retirement plans to a creative empire

Sheridan never planned any of this. “I was set up to retire. I was going to be done after Yellowstone. I’d bought the ranch in Weatherford, and I paid cash. I didn’t owe anybody anything,” he recalled. His vision at the time involved showing horses and tending what he called a little hobby herd.

The Four Sixes purchase changed the math. Financing it forced him to sign an exclusive overall deal with Paramount, one he had previously turned down. Since signing, he has created 7 series: Mayor of Kingstown, 1883, 1923, Lioness, Landman, Tulsa King and The Madison.