Writer sues Taylor Sheridan, says Yellowstone copied her casino pitch

A television writer has sued Taylor Sheridan for copyright infringement, alleging that Yellowstone, his most successful series, lifts specific elements from a show she pitched to his management company in 2016 and 2017. The reply she received said he was unavailable for television.

Lauren J. Salkin, an entertainment journalist and screenwriter based in Virginia, filed the complaint on August 21 in federal court in California, according to court documents reviewed by The Hollywood Reporter. It names Sheridan, Paramount, NBCUniversal, 101 Studios, his management company, Elevate Entertainment, and the producers John and Art Linson, among others.

The complaint says Salkin spent more than 10 years developing the proposed series, called Sovereign Nation, which it describes as a dramatic show centered on tribal governance, casino-driven economic power and a modern war over land and development. She submitted a pilot script, a show bible and a pitch deck to Elevate in late 2016 and early 2017, according to the filing.

The elements at issue

The suit does not claim ownership of the Western, of a land dispute, of an Indian casino or of the broad idea of a powerful family, distinctions the complaint states plainly. It identifies four of the specific expressive choices it says Yellowstone reproduced, starting with a tribal casino that functions as the institutional center of political and development power.

The three others, as the filing sets them out, are a confrontation staged in the tribal chairman's 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 mechanism for that expansion; and recurring master-plan imagery used to dramatize a struggle for territorial control.

Salkin's lawyers frame the claim as narrow, arguing that copyright does not protect an abstract idea and that the case rests instead on how she selected and arranged a particular set of details the series then carried over.

According to the complaint, Salkin registered the overall project with the U.S. Copyright Office beginning in 2010 and the pilot script in 2016, years before the series reached the screen. Elevate replied in February 2017.

A pitch and a rejection

Salkin submitted the Sovereign Nation package to Elevate, which represents Sheridan, and says she believes the materials reached him directly.

She points to Elevate's written reply as evidence her materials were reviewed. The complaint says the note thanked her for her interest and said Sheridan was unavailable for television projects.

Taylor thanks you very much for your interest. Unfortunately, he's unavailable for TV projects.

The suit reads that reply against Sheridan. He was not, in fact, unavailable, it argues, and he and others instead used her copyrighted works to build Yellowstone. Paramount Network, then eight months from replacing Spike TV, announced Yellowstone on May 3, 2017 as its first scripted series, and the first episode aired on June 20, 2018.

Casting and an HBO meeting

Salkin's pitch deck named Danny Huston and Gil Birmingham as potential casting for Sovereign Nation, the complaint says, and both actors later appeared in Yellowstone. Birmingham played Thomas Rainwater, chairman of the Confederated Tribes of Broken Rock, and Huston played Dan Jenkins, a land developer. The suit calls the two roles materially parallel to its own.

The filing also describes a meeting Salkin says she had with a senior scripted-television executive at HBO, whom it does not name, about Sovereign Nation. That executive, she alleges, had already rejected Sheridan's Yellowstone pitch in the spring of 2017 because it resembled her work too closely.

The infringement alleged here lies in the copying of Salkin's particular expressive choices and their coordinated selection and arrangement.

What appeared in Yellowstone was not merely another Western about land or family, the filing states, and Salkin's argument rests on that pattern of choices taken together rather than on any single scene she says the series reused.

What Salkin is seeking

Salkin is seeking damages tied to the alleged infringement, a figure the complaint leaves unspecified but says should include profits earned across the Yellowstone franchise. She is also asking the court for an injunction against continuing and future infringement of her work, and she has requested that the case be decided by a jury.

Her attorney, Paul B. Lackey, described the case as a classic David-versus-Goliath situation. He said Salkin spent years building the framework for a story that became, in his words, the biggest streaming success of all time, and had decided that enough was enough.

The reach of the claim

The lawsuit extends beyond the flagship show. It claims the Yellowstone spinoffs 1883, 1923, Marshals and Dutton Ranch are also based on Salkin's original work, a step that widens the alleged infringement across much of the franchise Sheridan built out for Paramount.

Yellowstone ran for five seasons between 2018 and 2024 and featured Kevin Costner, Luke Grimes, Kelly Reilly, Cole Hauser and Wes Bentley. It grew into a franchise that anchored Paramount's programming, spawning prequels and spinoffs that carried the Dutton family story across earlier decades.

Sheridan, among television's most prolific creators with credits including Tulsa King, Landman and Mayor of Kingstown, has a Paramount deal that runs through 2028 and a television deal at NBCUniversal that begins on January 1, 2029.

No response from the defendants

Variety said Sheridan, Paramount, 101 Studios and Elevate Entertainment did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and TMZ and TheWrap reported the same of Sheridan, Paramount and NBCUniversal. None of the defendants has answered the allegations publicly.

None of the claims has been tested in court. A copyright case of this kind turns on whether a judge or jury finds the two works substantially similar in their protected expression, rather than in the ideas, settings or genre they share, a distinction Salkin's own lawyers stress in the complaint.

Sheridan began writing Yellowstone as a film in 2013, and the project was set up at HBO before moving to Paramount in 2017. Salkin argues that window overlaps directly with the period in which she was pitching Sovereign Nation.

The franchise has drawn earlier legal disputes over casting and trademarks. This one goes at where Yellowstone came from.

Salkin's claims are unlikely to be tested for months.