President Donald Trump has single-handedly destroyed one of the most popular shows on television, the Daily Beast’s chief creative and content officer declared.
In a new episode of Obsessed: The Podcast, Joanna Coles and Kevin Fallon discussed the evolution of television, including the dire lack of good sex on-screen. Coles also pointed out that certain TV shows have become “Trumpier,” namely, Taylor Sheridan’s Landman.
Landman, a drama series on Paramount+, explores the oil and gas industry in America and stars Billy Bob Thornton, Ali Larter, Jacob Lofland, and Demi Moore, who joined the cast in its second season. Coles said she binged the show on a recent flight, but saw a discrepancy between the first season and its sequel.
“I’ve started watching Season 2, but something has happened between the writing of Season 1 and Season 2. I don’t know if they’ve changed the writing rooms, but I think actually what’s happened is Trump, and the show has become weirdly Trumpier,” she said.
Coles went on to slam Sheridan’s depictions of female characters. “I’ve never liked Taylor Sheridan’s women characters actually. They don’t seem believable,” she said.
Sheridan, 55, who also created Yellowstone, 1923, and Mayor of Kingstown, has increasingly been accused of leaning MAGA and making shows that reflect this, through both dialogue and characterization. Fallon said that Sheridan is “defensive” about his shows being called “MAGA shows.”
“He’s always so defensive about it, saying that ‘that’s not the case. It’s not true. He’s very centrist.’ But it sounds like maybe that’s changing,” he mused.
Sheridan’s politics are evidently complicated. David Ellison, the MAGA-friendly CEO of Skydance, which took over Paramount, called Sheridan a “singular genius” in August 2025, saying, “My goal is to have Taylor call Paramount his home for as long as he wants to be telling stories.”
However, Sheridan walked out on Paramount in October 2025, because, according to The Wall Street Journal, he refused to make his shows “overtly political.” In 2019, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter told The New York Times, “I am apolitical publicly. I don’t want to be preached to, so I’m not going to preach to anybody else. But I’m not just going to show you one side. I’m going to show you all sides.”
Coles doubled down on the pitfalls of Landman, saying “there isn’t a single decent female character” in Sheridan’s work, while “the men are all really interesting.”
“It’s just so disappointing because it’s such a good show in many other ways. And the landscape’s fantastic. The music is fantastic. The storyline is great. It’s proper cliffhangers,” she continued. “And yet the women characters. are sort of silly and foolish and are getting more so. They’re not getting wiser in the show.”
Coles pointed out that Moore, in particular, “deserves a more complicated character and better lines.”
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