1883 Boss Reveals Paramount+ Wanted to Change Major Deaths to Make Another Season

1883 concluded on Paramount+ earlier this year.

Despite the streaming service ordering up a second season ahead of the finale, Taylor Sheridan has revealed that he wanted to end that chapter.

However, Sheridan has opened up in a new interview with Deadline to reveal that Paramount+ wanted him to reverse some significant deaths to keep the show alive.

Sheridan touched upon the "autonomy" he's been given following the runaway success of the original Yellowstone on Paramount Network.

"No one has had the freedom I've had since Robert Evans ran Paramount," he told Deadline.

"Bobby Evans had made movies before he became the head of the studio and so he understood how to turn them loose. If you trust them, trust them, and turn them loose."

"And under his regime, Paramount made some of the best movies they'd ever made, some of the best movies ever made."

"The Godfather being one of them. Love Story, many others. Bet on Al Pacino. Al Pacino had to borrow five dollars from them to get to the premiere."

Sheridan said that people at Paramount read the finale script and were confused about the deaths.

"I know they read the scripts, but they don't read scripts, so when they read the last episode of 1883, I don't think they digested what had just happened, even though I made it quite clear from the very beginning."

"The story I heard is [Paramount boss] Bob Bakish watched it and said, 'Wait a minute, she dies! They all die? What do we do in Season 2?' I said, there is no Season 2."

"They're like, there better be a f—ing season two because we already picked it up. I'm sitting here going, guys everyone is dead."

In a last-ditch effort to get a second season, Paramount wanted Sheridan to change the fate of Sam Elliot's character, Shea Brennan.

"They wanted to have a meeting about how Sam Elliott survived his suicide," Sheridan said.

"By the very nature of the term, it's not something survivable, and who would want to see that? So, I said I'll come up with another peek into the window, and I sat there and tried to look at it."

Sheridan recalled the studio wondering when they would read a script, but he was struggling to write an additional season of 1883, and he found more history that could be used to showcase more of the Duttons in different eras.

"I don't know how to write the next season of this damn thing,' but I kept hunting history, and I kept finding things.

"It's the one great thing about the Dutton family; you can skip generations and put them in all these unique situations, and it has nothing to do with Yellowstone, nothing to do with 1883, and yet it's tethered completely to them, but they're all standalones," Sheridan said of what became 1923.