{"id":1163974,"date":"2026-08-23T01:09:22","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T01:09:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1163974\/"},"modified":"2026-08-23T01:09:22","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T01:09:22","slug":"taylor-sheridan-accused-of-stealing-yellowstone-from-2016-pitch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1163974\/","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Sheridan Accused of Stealing ‘Yellowstone’ From 2016 Pitch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWriter Lauren J. Salkin has accused Taylor Sheridan<\/a> of stealing his marquee series \u201cYellowstone<\/a>\u201d from her 2016 pitch in a lawsuit filed on Friday. 101 Studios, Paramount<\/a> and Elevate Entertainment are also listed as defendants.<\/p>\n

\n\tReps for Sheridan, 101 Studios, Paramount and Elevate Entertainment did not immediately respond to Variety\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the court documents, obtained by Variety, Salkin alleges that she pitched her own sprawling Western drama, \u201cSovereign Nation,\u201d to Sheridan\u2019s management company, Elevate Entertainment, in 2016, only to be told: \u201cTaylor thanks you very much for your interest. Unfortunately, he\u2019s unavailable for TV projects.\u201d The suit then claims that \u201cYellowstone\u201d was greenlit at Paramount \u201cwithin months\u201d of her rejection.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSheridan, however, was not \u2018unavailable for TV projects,\u2019\u201d the suit reads, \u201cInstead, he and others used Salkin\u2019s copyrighted works to develop Yellowstone. On June 20, 2018, Paramount Network aired its first episode.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lawsuit lists several \u201cspecific expressive choices\u201d that \u201cYellowstone\u201d allegedly lifted from Salkin\u2019s \u201cSovereign Nation.\u201d Those elements, the suit states, include \u201ca tribal casino functioning as the institutional center of political and development power; a signature confrontation staged in the tribal chairman\u2019s casino office over expansion beyond reservation boundaries; the use of trust land, the absence of zoning restrictions, and a 99-year lease structure as the concrete mechanism for that expansion; and recurring master-plan imagery deployed to dramatize the struggle for territorial control.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSalkin\u2019s lawyers also claim that she \u201cproposed\u201d Danny Huston and Gil Birmingham for \u201cSovereign Nation\u201d in her pitch deck. Both were later cast in \u201cYellowstone\u201d and played \u201cmaterially parallel structural roles: Birmingham as the tribal political leader whose authority and development strategy run through the casino, and Huston as the outside development power broker who supplies the political or commercial path for that expansion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe suit later states, \u201cWhen the works are objectively compared, the same coordinated design repeatedly appears: casino-centered institutions organize political power; the same unusual land-development mechanisms propel the conflict; parallel scenes perform the same dramatic functions; and the same actors appear in materially parallel roles. These are not merely convergences of a shared genre. Taken together with access and timing, they support a strong inference of copying.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Writer Lauren J. Salkin has accused Taylor Sheridan of stealing his marquee series \u201cYellowstone\u201d from her 2016 pitch…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1163975,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3940],"tags":[4080,77,2590,137538,16,15,2591],"class_list":["post-1163974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-paramount","tag-taylor-sheridan","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-yellowstone"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117142156850282251","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1163974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1163975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1163974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1163974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1163974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}