[Note: The below review includes detailed spoilers for the first three episodes of “1923” Season 2.]
How can Taylor Sheridan juggle it all?
That’s usually asked about the creator regarding how he’s conceived and aired eight scripted TV series in a little more than six years. It also applies to his current and most sprawling series, “1923.” This show currently balances at least seven storylines, all featuring characters on their own journeys in different settings and largely separated from one another. Managing just the set-building alone seems a Herculean task, even if several of the storylines are shot on Sheridan’s sprawling 6666 Ranch in Texas.
What’s impressive is how all of these are built around characters so compelling that you can’t wait to “check in” on what’s happening in the next storyline — and Sheridan always leaves you wanting more, with most storylines not taking up much more than a few minutes of each episode. It’s also impressive how all these threads still feel part of one fabric.
The tonal whiplash that sometimes occurred in Season 1, when you’d go from Teonna (Aminah Nieves) being brutally beaten and abused in an American Indian boarding school to the fun, sexy adventures of big game hunter Spencer (Brandon Sklenar) and aristocrat Alexandra (Julia Schlaepfer) in Africa — there was literally a “sex on the beach” episode — could be jarring. That’s largely gone this time around, as each thread feels far more integrated even when dealing with characters hundreds of miles apart.
Teonna’s storyline in Season 1 was massively important, simply for how little, if ever, the abuse suffered by young Indigenous Americans in Catholic Church-run boarding schools had ever been depicted in American film or TV before. (The terrific Oscar-nominated documentary “Sugarcane” was still more than a year away from being released.) In Season 2, her storyline is all about liberation. After killing the nun (Jennifer Ehle) who was her primary abuser within an entire system designed to abuse, Teonna went on the run. She’s now hiding out in Texas with her father, Runs His Horse (Michael Spears) and Pete Plenty Clouds (Jeremy Gauna, stepping in for the late Cole Brings Plenty). After all she’s been through, the love story that develops between Teonna and Pete feels particularly sweet.
Sheridan handles trauma deftly in his shows: What Teonna suffered was important to show simply for educational purposes, to illuminate a horror still largely unknown among the broader American public. Contrast that with the extremely brief aside in “1883” alluding to the likely background of Lamonica Garrett’s character Thomas: When Sam Elliott’s character says there’s nothing more frightening than the unknown, Thomas says that if you grew up the way he did, there are more frightening things than the unknown. He grew up in slavery. But in that case, Sheridan recognized that Black suffering has been so endlessly depicted in American media, to the point of exploitation, that it was more appropriate to leave the reference there to Thomas’s enslavement at that. No horrendous flashbacks were needed.
Sheridan’s also extremely adept at showing how abusive personal acts are tied to institutional abuses. A storyline in “1923” where the main villain Whitfield (Timothy Dalton) has turned two sex workers he hired against each other, with one literally now being imprisoned by the other, has drawn criticism on social media for its nudity and extremity. It is also illustrative of how powerful forces use manipulation and abuse to divide people who should otherwise be united. There’s always a thread linking personal and systemic violence in Sheridan’s work.
Just take a look at what’s happened with Alexandra. Her storyline with Spencer in Season 1 was pure romance and adventure: Menaced by lions while hiding up a tree in the Serengeti, menaced by sharks while out on the Indian Ocean on a capsized tugboat, menaced by British aristocrats on a luxury ocean liner, a conflict that culminates in a shipboard duel and the star-crossed couple’s separation. Both have now been making their way to America separately, with Spencer landing in Galveston — and getting caught up with the mafia there — and Alexandra in New York.
Alexandra’s storyline in Season 2 is a potent look at the way this country has always treated immigrants: She’s forced to disrobe for multiple invasive, demeaning inspections, and otherwise treated with total disregard and indignity, culminating in her dramatic reading of a Walt Whitman poem to prove to the dehumanizing Ellis Island authorities that she’s literate and has “marketable” skills to give America. There’s no way that anyone watching this wouldn’t be on her side — and if you can empathize with her, maybe you can empathize with all the immigrants who come to America who aren’t secretly members of the extended British royal family as she is.
Sheridan’s certainly suspicious of government in a way that aligns him with old-school conservatives and puts him out of step with many of those who claim to be conservative today. At least, that’s what comes across in these shows. The sheer number of vile New York moguls with real-estate ambitions in these series suggests as much: In Dalton’s Whitfield, we have an all-timer.
An aside Whitfield has in the second episode where he witnesses some of his Norwegian mining team going skiing — which triggers the thought that he can market Montana as a tourist destination — is indicative of Sheridan’s whole approach. He’s not interested in aligning neatly with any party’s particular platform, something that likely frustrates the rigid ideologues who watch these shows. He’s interested in long-term struggles between tradition and progress, conservation and development.
When Michelle Randolph’s Elizabeth reacts violently toward having to get rabies shots in her stomach for two weeks and is held down in order to receive them, it’s a moment that at first seems like it could align with anti-vaxxers — except that the person ordering that she receive the vaccines is Helen Mirren’s Cara, who, through the power of her performance, and the way Sheridan venerates her through the writing, is as unambiguously heroic as any character in Sheridan’s universe. If she says Elizabeth needs these shots, Elizabeth needs to man up. (“Manning up” is a continual theme throughout all of these shows, and in this case, it does feel like Sheridan’s captured something about the vaccine discourse that’s wildly under-discussed: Many anti-vaxxers may adopt that view simply because they’re scared of needles.) Especially since another character is literally going to need a hole drilled in his skull without anesthetic and has manned up enough to deal with that.
All of which is to say: Looking to tick boxes on a political checklist here is a fool’s errand, and it’s sad that there seems to be such an insistence on doing so by critics who’d prefer to engage with ideology rather than art. It’s time to see people as people again, and not avatars of different political positions (or grievances). If there’s a through-line here that unites everything in Sheridan’s work, it’s empathy, a desire to show respect for one another — and illuminate the disrespect that all too often defines human relations. The guy who has his skull drilled into? It’s to relieve pressure on his brain from the horrible head injury he sustained being beaten up by racists who object to how he’s married to a Japanese woman. When a U.S. Marshal scoffs that a Marshal could ever be a woman — having just come upon Marshal Mamie Fossett (Jennifer Carpenter), a real-life figure who patrolled what became Oklahoma — she tells him he’s “a bigot living in the wrong century.”
Sheridan believes in nuance, too, in showing the human dimension of people who are even outright monsters. There’s a great scene where the Catholic priest, Father Renaud (Sebastian Roché), who’s as vile as any villain we’ve ever seen on these shows for the abuse he inflicted not only on the Native Americans at Teonna’s residential school but also on the nuns there, talks at length about how Black men did rule part of Europe at one time — referring to Moorish rule of Spain and southern France — and how they created some of the greatest architecture on the continent. Somehow, amid all these disconnected threads, Sheridan can have a moment in his narrative that purely breathes, where nothing much happens except that most important of things: an exchange of ideas.
These pauses, so skillfully executed by director Ben Richardson in the first three episodes, are what make “1923” especially cinematic. Even with so much ground to cover, these scenes rarely exist to just get you to the next scene. There’s more here than just plot, even though there is a ton of plot. Combine this rhythm with the extraordinary production values on display in every scene, including a hydraulic rig used to rock the steerage cabin Alexandra is in on her trip to America, to simulate the ship going through a fearsome storm (and all just for one brief moment), and “1923” looks a lot more cinematic than even a fair number of movies released in theaters these days. That’s even before you add Harrison Ford into the mix to give an extra splash of big-screen sprawl.
Sheridan’s frenetic output the past few years puts to shame even Aaron Sorkin writing every script for “The West Wing” in its first few seasons. These shows are an extraordinary flex of a genuine auteur’s power. Sheridan told Deadline in 2022, “No one has had the freedom I’ve had since Robert Evans ran Paramount.” Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise then that Paramount was the studio willing to extend him this largesse.
That he has the ambition to match that freedom and those resources is actually what puts him in Evans’ league. If “1883,” Sheridan’s most perfectly formed series, was his “Godfather,” then “1923” is his “Godfather Part II”: sprawling, even scattershot, but an extraordinary personal statement painted on the largest possible canvas. Coppola’s great theme was corruption and its inevitability. Sheridan’s is about the survival of dignity in a world of astonishing indignities. Where everything seems more and more about degradation. “1923” is no period piece, as much as it is also full of escapist pleasures. It is everlasting and urgent. May Sheridan keep this juggling act going.
Grade: A-
New episodes of “1923” are released weekly each Sunday on Paramount+. Episode 4 of Season 2 is available to stream now.
