Inhaling Ideology: The Madison Perfects the Sheridan Formula
The show is beautifully shot, well-acted, and genuinely moving in spots. Once you see the machinery, though, you can’t unsee it.
The Madison is the latest expansion in Taylor Sheridan’s ever-growing Paramount+ empire, this time trading the Dutton ranch for the Madison River valley in central Montana. The show follows the Clyburn family, a pack of obnoxiously wealthy Manhattan elites, after a plane crash kills patriarch Preston Clyburn and his younger brother Paul, who was piloting the aircraft. That’s not a spoiler Sheridan tried to hide. It’s the ignition switch.
Matriarch Stacy Clyburn, played with considerable depth by Michelle Pfeiffer, leads the family west. The grief brigade includes daughters Abby (Beau Garrett), a divorced mother who’s never quite figured out who she is, and Paige (Elle Chapman), the more career-focused younger sister. Paige’s investment-banker husband Russell McIntosh (Patrick J. Adams) rounds out the New York contingent, rendered largely as an outsider in a family of women. Two granddaughters, teenage Bridgette (Amiah Miller) and young Macy (Alaina Pollack), complete the caravan.
Kurt Russell plays Preston, and yes, he appears despite being dead, his scenes filmed a year after the rest of the cast due to a scheduling conflict with his Apple TV+ series. Sheridan and Pfeiffer essentially pitched Paramount into an early Season 2 renewal just to get Russell on board. Montana-side, the family is orbited by Van Davis (Ben Schnetzer), a sheriff’s deputy who becomes Abby’s reluctant love interest, and Cade (Kevin Zegers), their neighbor and de facto guide to a landscape none of them have ever had to survive. Will Arnett appears in a recurring role as Dr. Phil Yorn, which may be the most on-the-nose character name in prestige television history.
What Actually Happens
Stacy, by her own prior admission a “city mouse” who had never visited Preston’s beloved Montana cabins in decades of marriage, now finds herself responsible for burying him there. The family, none of whom know how to make coffee without a machine, let alone navigate a working ranch, fumbles through grief and altitude with predictable friction. The humor in the early episodes is genuine: the Clyburns are fish-out-of-water played with affection rather than contempt.
The season ends with Stacy choosing to stay in Montana permanently. Not for a few days of pioneer cosplay. Permanently. Her children are stunned. She is resolved. Preston’s death didn’t just end a marriage. It ended a self, and Montana, with its land, its silence, its physical demands and handshake contracts, is building a new one. The Guardian called the whole arrangement “thuddingly simplistic,” observing that Montana functions as The Shire to New York City’s Mordor. That’s a little uncharitable. But not wrong.
The Machinery Beneath the Scenery
Here’s where it gets interesting. The Madison is the most emotionally refined version of an argument Sheridan has been making across every show he’s produced. The argument, stripped to its studs: coastal American life produces hollow people. Montana, or Texas, or anywhere with dirt under your boots and actual consequences, produces serious ones. If the city is the wound, the land, it stands to reason, is the cure.
In Yellowstone this argument came wrapped in land wars and political violence. In Landman it came as Billy Bob Thornton sermonizing about the dignity of oil work. In The Madison it arrives in its most palatable form: a grief story with a brilliant lead actress and some of the most expensive landscape shots on streaming television. Variety called it thin on story and heavy on scenery. That’s the mechanism, not a flaw. The scenery is the argument. You don’t finish the show thinking, "Cities bad, Montana good.” You feel it: the grandeur of open land, the shallowness of therapeutic culture, the way physical consequence cuts through emotional noise.
Sheridan himself rejects the red-state label with genuine amusement. He points to his Indigenous storylines, corporate villains, female protagonists who can outfight any man on screen. All true. Also true: every liberal-coded character in his universe is either a predator, a bureaucratic obstacle, or, in The Madison’s gentler formulation, a victim of some sort. Every conservative-coded character carries moral weight. Sherida’s balance sheet is remarkably consistent across a decade of output.
The Beverly Hillbillies Problem
The Madison is structurally an upside-down Beverly Hillbillies. In that show, the Clampetts rolled into Beverly Hills and exposed every banker and socialite as a pretentious fool through sheer rural common sense. But the Clampetts were gloriously ridiculous too. Jethro thought a cement pond was high living. The comedy ran in all directions. Nobody held moral high ground unchallenged.
Sheridan’s ranchers are never ridiculous. They never misunderstand things. They grasp things coastal elites cannot. The Clyburns’ confusion about basic ranch life is played for warmth, not mockery, but the asymmetry is structural. Montana teaches. New York has nothing to offer in return. Green Acres at least let Zsa Zsa Gabor be right about the curtains. Stacy Clyburn arrives in Montana carrying nothing worth keeping, and the show knows it before she does.
Worth Watching. Worth Watching Carefully.
The Madison is, by most measures, solid television. Pfeiffer’s performance alone justifies watching. Eight million viewers in its first ten days weren’t wrong. The craft is good too. The emotional journey is genuine. And Season 2’s already in the can, with Kurt Russell promising darker territory ahead.
But the most effective cultural arguments are the ones that don’t announce themselves as arguments. They arrive as beautiful landscapes, as grief you recognize, as characters you care about, and the ideology is inhaled rather than argued. Tens of millions of viewing hours, across a decade, repeating the same moral geography. The city as site of trauma. A wound. Land as cure. The verdict, always, set before the first script page.
The Madison reads as Sheridan’s most intimate, almost introspective, work. It’s also his most complete delivery of a worldview he’s been building since Yellowstone. Both things are true. Neither cancels the other out.