‘Landman’ Review: At Least Taylor Sheridan’s Mediocre Paramount+ Soap Gives Billy Bob Thornton Plenty of Fuel
The line that we so often use to describe a talented performer is that we’d pay to listen to them read the phone book.
Nobody, in 2024, knows what a phone book is.
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Perhaps it is time for a rhetorical modification. We could salute performers as being so talented we’d pay to listen to them recite a rambling, pseudo-poetic treatise on the nobility of the oil industry.
Sure, the phrase may not be useful in every context. But it’s the healthiest way of approaching Paramount+’s Landman, the latest series from the one-man assembly line that is Taylor Sheridan. For the purposes of this drama, he’s abandoned any and all pretense of having a writing staff — and with him also directing the first two episodes, this may be Taylor Sheridan’s most Taylor Sheridan-y show to date.
That means big stars (not always well-used), big melodramatic swings (not always well-executed), and big tonal detours that left me unsure if Landman is meant to be at least semi-comedic. There’s a huge ensemble but very few fully conceived characters, just lots of Stetson-wearing dogmatic monologues waiting to happen. It’s bluntly entertaining and bluntly infuriating, characterized by the excesses of a producer to whom nobody ever says no.
That is to say, it’s exactly the show that consumers of the Taylor Sheridan industrial complex are probably demanding — though since he rarely allows any hunger to develop between his individual titles, “demand” might be a strong word.
Oh, and it has Billy Bob Thornton, who is absolutely an actor so talented I would voluntarily listen to him recite rambling, pseudo-poetic treatises on the nobility of the oil industry. Which is a good thing, because Landman offers a bunch of those.
Thornton plays Tommy Norris, who serves a nebulous Mr. Fix-It role for an independent oil company owned by the impeccably coifed Monty (Jon Hamm) and operating out of West Texas. (As an in-joke, Tommy even attends game for the Permian High School football team, which Thornton fictionally coached in Friday Night Lights.)
Tommy is a mess. Or he’s coming out of being a mess. A fitfully recovering alcoholic — he drinks a lot of Michelob Ultra, one of many very proud product placements — with deep debts stemming from oil prospecting, he’s got a son who dropped out of college to work the oil fields (Jacob Lofland’s Cooper), a teenage daughter who talks like a porn star (Michelle Randolph’s Ainsley) and an ex-wife who likes to flirt with him via FaceTime (Ali Larter’s Angela).
He also pontificates like this: “There’s two types of people that work in the patch: dreamers and losers. Used to be that way in the whole nation. Failures headed out West to either die or succeed. All the way to California. But there’s not any dreamers out there anymore. There’s thieves and fools. This is where dreamers come now. And losers come here to win. Which one are you gonna be?”
Tommy loves monologuing, and he loves oil. If many of the petroleum-based facts he enjoys sharing with people are blatantly incorrect, you can’t say that Landman is wrong, because Tommy Norris is a huckster for the oil industry. Just because a character says something doesn’t mean that his series believes it, only that it doesn’t have the time for anybody to make a counter-argument without getting mocked.
Tommy’s job is everything. He secures land-lease agreements. He handles local law enforcement. He makes tough business calls, but only after asking Monty for permission. Things are a bit catastrophic around the patch these days: A truck ran into a stolen plane in the middle of a drug deal and things went boom. The oil rigs are getting dangerous and also causing things to go boom. Lots of things are going boom, in fact. Tommy is consequently forced to work with cutthroat lawyer Rebecca (Kayla Wallace), who’s here to alternately get offended by the dumb stuff TV creators think Gen Z folks get offended by — “dumb stuff” like sexism and ageism — and verbally castrate men.
Tommy lives in a housing development McMansion that has become a halfway house for temporarily visiting oil employees, including engineer Dale (James Jordan) and attorney Nate (Colm Feore), and an occasional crash pad for the spring-breaking Ainsley, which causes hilarity to ensue.
Here, incidentally, is what Landman thinks is hilarious: Ainsley is referred to multiple times as being 17. Randolph, who plays Ainsley, is in her mid-20s and looks roughly in her mid-20s. This allows for every shot of Ainsley to linger on her rear end, to the point that the only thing we know about Nate besides his job is that he gets very distracted by Ainsley parading around the house in her underwear. If Canada declares war on the United States in the next three months, a leading motivation will be the squandering of national treasure Colm Feore in a role that asks him to unconvincingly wear a cowboy hat and more convincingly try to avoid ogling a teenage girl.
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “male gaze” and not understood what it meant, I recommend checking out the two Sheridan-directed chapters of Landman and observing how the two primary pieces of cinematic grammar are seemingly endless montages of people working on oil rigs at sundown, and shots where the camera actively seeks out the derriere of an adolescent whose non-butt-related defining characteristic is her childlike desire for her mommy and daddy to get back together. None of this is Randolph’s fault, but it’s hugely icky.
Sheridan’s series always walk a delicately uncomfortable line with their female characters. You get the full range here, including Saintly Woman of Color (Paulina Chavez, whose Ariana is either the show’s most sympathetic character or a master manipulator), Oversensitive Cutthroat, Stereotypical Manipulative First Wife, Sexy Bikini Barista and What the Heck Is Demi Moore Doing Here?
Moore plays Cami, Monty’s wife. Out of the five episodes sent to critics, she spends two swimming laps in a pool, one cheering at a track meet for a daughter who is never mentioned at any other point and one telling Monty he ought to work out more. It would be possible, if her name weren’t in the opening credits, to not even be aware that it’s Moore in the role, because the show is so completely uninterested in her presence.
Mind you, I can’t rule out the possibility that she’ll eventually get one of those operatic Sheridan monologues to validate this use of her time. Hamm is barely used at all (though still much more than Moore) for most of those episodes, but in the fifth he gets a quality rant about the stupidity of oil and natural gas’ opponents that I can only assume was presented to him ahead of time as the lure for his participation. Nevertheless, the gap in quality material between this and his Emmy nominated turn in Fargo is vast.
So who, exactly, does have material worthy of their talents?
Well, it starts with Thornton. “Drawling salesman” has always been one of his best modes. Whether he’s standing up to tough-talking drug lords and local police or talking down to the attorney who’s either there to protect him or get him thrown in jail, he’s the man capable of making Sheridan’s most muscular and profane dialogue sound human, and his most nonsensical bouts of word salad sound muscular and profane. Thornton is also really great with Larter, playing the one person Tommy struggles to stand up to. Larter is genuinely and effectively funny in an outsized way that doesn’t match anything in the rest of the show, but which I have no doubt is intentional. (If you want another point of illustration for the male gaze, check out how Stephen Kay, director of the third to fifth installments, films Larter.)
Elsewhere, Wallace nails her one big monologue, but Rebecca is written to be so unappealing in the scenes leading up to it that it’s hard for the character to bounce back. Lofland has a natural discomfort that works well for a character who’s decided he wants to participate in a world that’s entirely foreign to him — though Cooper spends roughly 10 minutes doing yard work in a 64-minute fifth episode that is perhaps the 64-minute episode least worthy of being 64 minutes in the Peak TV era. Michael Pe?a and Emilio Rivera very quickly establish very underwritten characters, but they aren’t used extensively.
You can see, in general, why this was a subject matter that appealed to Sheridan, who is credited as co-creator along with Boomtown podcast host Christian Wallace. Oil, as well as cattle (Yellowstone) and prisons (Mayor of Kingstown), are all throwback industries that feel linked to Manifest Destiny and the Old West. They’re capitalism writ large, and you can have your characters babble incessantly about the price of barrels of oil or the mechanics of a failing rig and audiences will understand the broad strokes. Sheridan likes the ugliness of people who get rich too fast and the pathos of people who go bust too soon, the nobility of men who can pull off a cowboy hat and the viciousness of women who know when to whimper and when to vivisect.
This story has all of those things, conveyed without the filter that might have come from a more collaborative process. But which Sheridan fans want Sheridan to have a filter anyway? He makes testosterone-fueled soap operas for people who would like to pretend they’re too macho to watch soap operas, and this one features Billy Bob Thornton in fine form.
You absolutely know if you’re the target audience.
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