‘Landman’: What If ‘Yellowstone,’ But With Oil?

There are few character types on television whom it would seem quite as exhausting to be as the only guy who knows how to get things done on a Taylor Sheridan show. From Kevin Costner on Yellowstone to Jeremy Renner on Mayor of Kingstown — and now Billy Bob Thornton on Sheridan’s new drama Landman — these men are perpetually running from one crisis to the next, all of them someone else’s fault, no one else seemingly having the first clue how to solve them.

Every writer puts some of themselves into the characters they write, and it’s not hard to draw a line from Costner’s John Dutton or Thornton’s Tommy Norris to their creator, who has become a one-man TV drama factory in the six years since Yellowstone debuted. Landman is the eighth of Sheridan’s series to premiere over that period. With some shows, like Tulsa King, he will delegate responsibilities, but he often prefers to do as much as possible himself. Though there was a brief period in Yellowstone Season Two where Sheridan was co-writing episodes with others, the great majority of the series is credited only to him as writer. This year alone, his will be the sole name on the scripts of 24 different hours of television, between Yellowstone, Landman, and Lioness (formerly known as Special Ops: Lioness). He also periodically directs episodes of his shows, particularly at the start, handles other producer duties, and is continually developing ideas for new series, whether set in the Yellowstone universe or not. 

Sheridan is far from the first showrunner to hold so tightly onto his series’ reins, nor is this year even close to a record. There was a TV season where Aaron Sorkin wrote or co-wrote 36 different episodes of Sports Night and The West Wing, and another where David E. Kelley wrote or co-wrote 47 different episodes of The Practice and Ally McBeal. That Sheridan’s shows make shorter seasons than what Sorkin, Kelley, or Shonda Rhimes used to do evens things out to a degree. Nonetheless, he’s doing a lot of jobs on a lot of different shows all at once, and his explanation for this in interviews sounds like something one of his leading men might say: Ultimately, nobody understands this terrain as well as Taylor Sheridan himself. 

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But as the one with so much control over the fictional lives of John Dutton and company, Sheridan is also probably best suited to recognize the limitations of this solo approach to problem-solving. Because his protagonists are always so overextended, their solutions more often than not inadvertently lead to even more catastrophes that, again, only they can fix. And the more (cowboy) hats that Taylor Sheridan tries to wear, the more threadbare the finished product becomes. Landman frequently plays like someone else asked ChatGPT to churn out a Sheridan-esque drama, or else like Sheridan wrote rough first drafts of each script, and simply ran out of time or energy to polish them into the versions he wants people to see. The sheer charisma and loquaciousness of Billy Bob Thornton cover up some of the gaps in the material, but many of the plots and characters feel awfully thin, and others come across so retrograde as to be self-parody. 

Like most of Sheridan’s work, Landman is a slick Eighties primetime soap opera dressed up in the trappings of a contemporary antihero drama — Dallas with cursing, more violence, and nudity. We’re introduced to Tommy in a vulnerable spot, being held at gunpoint by a drug cartel enforcer. They have a thorny problem to sort through: the cartel owns a patch of land outside Midland, Texas(*), but Tommy’s billionaire boss Monty (Jon Hamm) owns the mineral rights to all the oil that lurks beneath that land. The cartel wants to be left alone, and would be happy to use Tommy’s dead boy to make that happen. Tommy, though, could talk the skin off of a snake, and even with a burlap sack over his face, he’s able to spin a variation of the “We’re not so different, you and I” trope that spares his life and gets Monty his lease to drill on the land. Tommy doesn’t get a chance in that moment to talk about how West Texas used to be a place of black-and-white morality, while now everyone has to operate within shades of gray, but I assume that’s coming by the season finale. 

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(*) Midland’s sister city of Odessa was the setting of the Friday Night Lights film that Thornton starred in, and one episode even sees him taking in a game featuring the Permian Panthers, the team he coached in the movie. The Landman opening credits and theme song, meanwhile, pretty shamelessly echo Friday Night Lights the TV show. The vibes and level of execution are otherwise extremely different between Landman and either version of FNL.  

From there, we’re introduced to the rest of Tommy’s friends and family. His son Cooper (Jacob Lofland) has dropped out of college to learn the oil business from the ground up, working on a drilling crew with veteran wildcatters Luis (Emilio Rivera) and Armando (Michael Peña). His spoiled teenage daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) flies in to spend the weekend at the corporate McMansion that Tommy shares with lawyer Nathan (Colm Feore) and engineer Dale (James Jordan), and winds up sticking around. And Tommy’s business is frequently interrupted by FaceTime calls with his bitter ex-wife Angela (Ali Larter). As various problems explode — several of them literally — Monty is also forced to bring in outside counsel in the form of Rebecca (Kayla Wallace), whose youth and stridently woke attitude get her on Tommy’s bad side.   

Tommy is presented as a man who has well and truly screwed up his own life and career, now working as Monty’s fixer after being forced to abandon his own dreams of being an oil baron. He is $500,000 in debt, has been long estranged from both of his children as well as Angela, and is an alcoholic who insists he can get away with drinking beer because there’s so little actual alcohol in it. But the show treats him as correct about every subject, in every circumstance. Even when he makes a mistake — like, say, considering a reconciliation with Angela once she comes to town — he goes in recognizing it’s a mistake, and that he’s powerless to resist it. Tommy always knowing the right answer throws almost every interaction he has with other characters wildly out of balance, and it’s only Thornton’s fundamental charm that makes a lot of the material watchable in spite of that. Sheridan ends most Tommy scenes by giving him a zinger to show how clever he is, but they tend to be pretty weak, like when he hangs up on Angela by saying, “Enjoy the beach. Your tits look great. Don’t get syphilis!”  

Hamm, meanwhile, may as well not even be in the show. Despite being seemingly grown in a lab to frontline a Taylor Sheridan series about the changing American character, and the dwindling spaces for a particular kind of man’s man, Hamm is instead relegated to being a guy in a suit who pops up on occasion to look displeased while fielding phone calls from Tommy about the latest mess at the oil fields. In one episode, Monty gets to deliver a pencil sketch of a Don Draper speech, about how we all need the oil industry even as everyone complains about it and what it’s doing to the climate. But even that comes across as unnecessary, because Tommy has already given a similar lecture to Rebecca. This is a show that repeats its ideas often, perhaps because it doesn’t have a ton to say, perhaps because it just needs to fill time by any means necessary. (The fifth episode runs 64 minutes for some reason, which includes a lengthy montage of Cooper mowing and weeding someone else’s lawn.) 

But if Hamm has barely anything to do, Demi Moore has less than nothing to do as his wife Cami, whose only scene of note in the early episodes is to encourage Monty to take his pills and exercise more regularly. And simply by virtue of being so extraneous, Cami turns out to be the least worst female character on the show. Every other woman is some combination of dumb, hypersexualized, angry, humorless, or shrill. Many of Angela’s conversations with Tommy involve her alternately screaming at him and offering sexual favors. Rebecca is a progressive scold who thinks she’s too good for these people and their business, and is very obviously being set up to have the pants charmed off her (perhaps metaphorically, but probably literally) by Tommy. (When she objects to him referring to her as “the lady” to a bartender, he quips back, “Oh, did I guess wrong? I’m sorry, sir.”) 

And then there’s Ainsley, a 17-year-old played by an actor in her late-twenties — who looks like an actor in her late-twenties — whose primary function is to wander through scenes in her underwear, a bikini, or other skimpy outfits, and make all of her dad’s middle-aged buddies uncomfortable with how attractive they find this teenager. Every scene she’s in is gross, retrograde, and insulting to the intelligence of both that character and the audience. At one point — in a scene that will debut in the year of our lord 2024 — Ainsley is upset to open Instagram and see an ex-boyfriend with another girl, and screams, “How could he? She’s a fucking brunette!” Larter, Feore, and Thornton occasionally wring a laugh or two out of this stuff through their sheer energy, so long as you can ignore how misogynistic most of the writing is. 

The most effective material comes in Cooper’s interactions with Luis and his crew, who come across as actual people rather than functionaries in the series’ plots, and who suggest there’s a compelling story to be told about the mechanics of blue-collar life in an oil boomtown. But Rivera and Peña are written out very early on, the show quickly loses interest in the community, and Luis and Armando’s replacements are cartoon characters there simply to cause trouble for Cooper and create still more fires for Tommy to put out. 

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Tommy, Monty, and others talk often about the perils of being in a business dependent on a natural resource that is rapidly dwindling, and that they believe has no realistic replacement. They are just going to do everything they can to pump out the oil, and the money, while they still can, consequences be damned. Perhaps Sheridan insists on doing so much of the work himself because he’s worried that the television business is similarly heading for extinction, and that he’d best write as many episodes as he possibly can while there are still venues for him in which to do it. There’s interesting raw material in Landman, just as there is in pretty much everything Sheridan makes. But to get it up out of the ground and flowing, Sheridan might want to stop trying to do it all himself.   

The first two episodes of Landman begin streaming Nov. 17 on Paramount+, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen the first five.