Nearby on the brutal battlefield, the film’s narrator and central character, 18-year-old Elsa Dutton (Isabel May), is fighting for her life. A wagon is ablaze in the background. The white menfolk are elsewhere. And we have to wait until the series’ second-last episode – where the cliché evoked by the attack on the pioneers is brilliantly turned on its head – for an explanation of their absence and for the sequence’s aftermath.

Colton (Noah Le Gros), an amiable cowboy hired by the pioneers, is the first of them to arrive back at the scene. He finds the scalped woman still alive, but bleeding, out of her mind, and slowly dying a horrible death. They’re alone in the middle of nowhere, a beautiful but utterly inhospitable landscape. “The land of no mercy” is how Elsa describes it. Medical assistance is a lifetime away. Hating what he is about to do, Colton takes out his gun and puts her out of her agony.

When Shea Brennan (Sam Elliott), the wagon master, arrives, he finds a despairing Colton tormented by the life-ending decision he’s made, unable to reconcile what he’s done with any notion of civilisation. A captain in the Union Army during the Civil War – which ended on the day Elsa was born – Shea has seen it all before. “What’s decent out here? What’s the gauge?” he asks the desperate Colton, before providing the only possible answer: “You’re the gauge.”

In varying degrees of dramatic intensity, that exchange lies at the heart of all of Sheridan’s work. It’s crucial to virtually everything that happens in 1883, which not only builds a poignant family history for the Duttons of Yellowstone but also implicitly identifies what’s gone missing between the generations: the decency that Shea was alluding to.

In 1883, as the pioneers are confronted by one obstacle after another, they’re constantly forced to ponder impossible options. What’s the right thing to do when, as Elsa’s mother (Faith Hill) warns her daughter, “every choice has fangs”? Should her husband (Tim McGraw), a man of principle, put his family first, or the plight of their fellow travellers? In the western, everyone has to fend for themselves, inventing the rules on the run, and the consequences make it difficult to distinguish between what’s right and what ain’t.

It’s the same throughout Sheridan’s work. In Yellowstone, which is set in present-day Montana, the law is either corrupt or incompetent. Which leaves the rival landowners – rancher John Dutton (Kevin Costner), Indian reservation boss Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) and the property developers trying to expand their realm – to take matters into their own hands. The same goes for the underhand activities of the covert FBI team in the superb Sicario (2015, Stan), directed by Denis Villeneuve and based on Sheridan’s first-produced screenplay, and its visceral, Sheridan-written sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018, Apple, rental), directed by Stefano Sollima.

The law is also an irrelevance in The Mayor of Kingstown (2021-2022, Paramount +, recently renewed for a second season), as Renner’s self-appointed middle-man, an ex-con, negotiates the terms of the peace between the conflicting gangs making up the inmates of the town prisons, the guards who watch over them and the local police.

Not everything that bears Sheridan’s name as a writer or a director is likely to stand the test of time. Sicario: Day of the Soldado runs out of puff in the final 30 minutes; Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021, Netflix, Foxtel Now) is an efficient but dramatically slight reworking of aspects of the superior Wind River (2017, Stan, Binge, Foxtel Now); the finally ludicrous Without Remorse (2021, Prime), also directed by Sollima, perfunctorily returns to the high-level treacheries of Sicario; and Yellowstone loses some of its urgency after season two. But Sheridan has crammed a lot of impressive work into the seven years since Sicario.

And there’s more to come. Yellowstone’s fifth season premieres globally on November 14. A planned and approved sequel to 1883, entitled 1932, “will follow a new generation of Duttons during the time of Western expansion, Prohibition and the Great Depression”. Currently in pre-production is Lioness, a new series Sheridan has created with actress-producer Jill Wagner, set to star Zoe Saldana.
He’s also in pre-production on two further TV series, Tulsa King, a mob thriller starring the 75-year-old Sylvester Stallone, and Land Man, an oil rig drama set in West Texas and starring Billy Bob Thornton. Then there’s the feature, Fast, a crime thriller he’s written and Gavin O’Connor is set to direct. And he’s developing yet another Yellowstone spin-off entitled 6666 after the ranch where Jimmy (Jefferson White) goes to learn how to be a “real cowboy” in the fourth series of Yellowstone. So stay tuned.

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