Jon Bernthal Wants Taylor Sheridan To Adapt This '50s Western Masterpiece

OK, yes, Jon Bernthal floating a remake of the classic Western Shane as his dream Taylor Sheridan collaboration (post Those Who Wish Me Dead) could very well be a pipe dream. Just a bit of polite IP-baiting actors do to fill time during long press days. And if you’re going to dream up a future role in a piece of iconic Americana cinema, why not pick the '50s-era Oscar winner that served as the blueprint for every on-screen antihero tragedy that followed?

But hear us out: it should happen! The 1953 film is the more thoughtful and restrained version of a story that modern Westerns keep circling: a stranger with a violent past wanders into a community trying to build something fragile, then has to decide whether saving it means destroying himself. And with the resurgence of the genre, plus Sheridan’s recent move from Paramount+ to NBC Universal, maybe now’s the right time to pitch it as a future project in the vein of the gunslinging social commentary that the Yellowstone creator excels at.

'Shane' Invented the Prestige Western Antihero

Directed by George Stevens, Shane basically invented the narrative setup that’s been powering prestige Westerns for decades now, but it did it with just enough blood, swearing, and confusion over who the good guys really are in a tale like this to feel revolutionary for its time. Alan Ladd played the titular character, a violent stranger who wanders into a town and quickly inserts himself into a land war between its peaceful homesteaders and a cattle baron desperate for their land. Ladd’s Shane is stoic and mysterious with violence brimming at his surface, but he comes to care for the farmers – the family of a young boy named Joey in particular – and is easily incited to kill for their cause. The film challenged the conventional Western theme of “might is right,” translating the real consequences of the shoot-em-up action that marked most genre entries of the time.

That is where TV comes in. The movie only skims the surface of Shane’s beautifully tragic tale, refusing to dive too deep into the character, his past, and what fuels his lone-ranger lifestyle. A series would stick around longer, asking questions of its antihero and the townspeople he helps. It would show the families who quietly benefit from Shane’s capacity to kill; the way a whole community starts to treat violence like a public service. What begins as protection could slowly turn into a twisted kind of co-dependency with plenty of blood spilled.

Jon Bernthal and Taylor Sheridan Could Redefine 'Shane' for the Modern Age

Bernthal is such an unnervingly good fit for Shane too, because his entire career is basically a study in what it looks like when violence and vulnerability coexist. He transformed Frank Castle in The Punisher from a comic-book vigilante to a man slowly being hollowed out by loss, grief, and the sting of injustice. On The Walking Dead, his Shane Walsh was not just a hothead; he was a guy who genuinely believed brutality was the only way to keep people alive, right up until that belief destroyed him. Even in We Own This City, The Bear, and His & Hers, he keeps finding ways to make tough, aggressive men feel emotionally exposed and a little scared of themselves. That is exactly the kind of energy Shane needs. His version of the character would not be a romantic gunslinger riding in to save the day. It would be a flawed outlaw who knows he is bad for the town, but also, he's its only obvious savior, putting a raw, modern spin on the mythic character.

Sheridan’s real subject has never been cowboys and their guns so much as who gets to own what and why. Land, money, and violence are his holy trinity, and he keeps telling stories about how they warp everyone who touches them. That is why his Westerns feel so current, even when some are set in the past. So, whether he stuck to Shane’s traditional time period or jumped ahead a century or so, his version of the story could still work. After all, it’s about a town that makes an ugly bargain, letting one dangerous man handle its problems so everyone else can keep their hands clean, and then acting shocked when that deal eventually goes south.

A serialized version would make the town the real protagonist, though hopefully keeping Joey’s innocent POV as its moral center. We’d get episodes worth of watching Bernthal's lead and the pacifist townsfolk struggle with what’s right and what they can live with while fighting for their home – every small compromise seeming justifiable until they add up to something hauntingly irreversible. That's also why this would be such a smart pivot for Sheridan. Instead of building another sprawling empire, he would get to tell a tighter, sadder story that actually ends, one that plays like a tragedy rather than the pilot for three spin-offs.

Why Now Is the Perfect Time for a 'Shane' Reboot

There’s a reason Shane is one of the few Westerns of its era that still hold up decades later. It didn’t delight in its violence, but it didn’t shy away from it either, and it probed the mythmaking of the American West long before we started taking a closer look collectively on screen. Its influence is everywhere in the genre; many later works about conflicted outsiders and the price of cruelty in the name of capitalism trace back to the emotional and moral complexity Shane brought to a story that could have been a simple good guy versus gun-loving thugs tale.

Revisiting it now, this time with episodes instead of a couple of hours, makes sense, mostly because audiences are more interested in unpacking the costs of contrived heroism and the fallout of answering violence with violence in a community setting. But also, Bernthal re-teaming with Sheridan for a show that lets him ride horseback in leather chaps? It shouldn’t really matter what the IP is; that’s a no-brainer.