However You Feel About Taylor Sheridan Right Now, Landman Is Great TV
Taylor Sheridan wrote his latest television series, Landman, specifically for Billy Bob Thornton. “I’m gonna write it with your voice,” the Yellowstone creator said, according to Thornton. The actor revealed in a Q&A after the premiere that he couldn’t believe Sheridan until he finally received the script. “I read it,” Thornton recalled, “and I go, ‘Boy, you did get my voice, didn’t you?’”
In Landman, Thornton plays Tommy Norris, a middleman for a Texas oil company. For fans of Sheridan's work, Tommy is very similar to Jeremy Renner's character in Mayor of Kingstown. Instead of brokering deals between Michigan prisons and the gangs outside its walls, Tommy negotiates on behalf of the oil company with the workers in the field. He’s a problem-solver. Tommy Norris is also a loudmouth, a self-proclaimed divorced alcoholic, and, yes, a character who was clearly written with Billy Bob in mind.
When Landman’s pilot episode begins, Tommy couldn’t give two shits that he’s held prisoner by a Mexican cartel. Sheridan’s new favourite TV enemy kidnapped our Landman, placed a sack over his head, and tied him to a chair in the middle of nowhere. Even with a gun pointed to his head, the former Tombstone actor threatens the cartel that the oil company will “bust them like a piñata” if their deal falls through. He negotiates to save his life. Oil is a drug, just like what they’re pushing across the border. “You sell a product that your customers are dependent on,” he tells him. “It’s the same. Ours is just bigger.”
Tommy monologues as he drives back home, which—by the way—you should get used to. There’s a lot of driving in Landman. “The oil-and-gas industry makes $3 billion a day in pure profit,” he explains. “It’s the seventh-largest industry in the world, ranked ahead of food production, automobile production, coal mining, and—at $1.4 trillion—the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t even crack the top ten. The industries listed above oil and gas are completely dependent on oil and gas. That’s the size of this thing, and it’s only getting bigger.”
It can’t go understated how bad all of that is for the country. Finite resources like oil and gas help to destroy the planet’s climate at alarming rates, but the merits of the oil business are largely untouched in Landman. That’s probably for the best. As hard as it is to ignore, the facts of the matter aren’t important to Landman’s story. Tommy is just a man trying to find his place in a system of chaos. In Texas, this is how it is. So it’s Tommy’s job to secure the lease for the land in the name of the oil company and then make sure all of the workers do their job. “First part’s simple,” he says. “It’s the second part that can get you killed.”
Working on the oil patch is a dangerous job. Most of the company’s employees are ex-cons. They pay oil workers $180,000 a year to bash old wrenches against pipes that hopefully don’t explode in their face. It’s a field day any time an OSHA employee steps foot in Texas. Still, Landman isn’t The Wages of Fear. There’s no time to really discuss the ethics of all this. In fact, the company pays Tommy to make sure that never reaches media discourse. Keep the oil flowing and the workers happy.
Tommy’s autonomy allows him to act like one of Sheridan’s capitalist cowboys of the 21st century. He wavers between the 1 percent’s lawman and a Texas layman whenever the situation suits him best. His boss, Texas oil titan Monty Miller (Jon Hamm), is equally apolitical in his view of the American oil business. It’s just how he made his fortune—same as anyone else.
Who Else Stars on Landman?
The rest of the supporting cast is mostly all directly related to Tommy. His 20-something-year-old son, Cooper (Jacob Lofland), is starting his first day at work on the oil patch. Ainsley (Michelle Randolph), his 17-year-old daughter, is played by an actress who is a decade over 17. She also played Jack Dutton’s fiancée on 1923. Now she’s a teenager figuring out life while dating high school football prospect Dakota Loving (Drake Rodger). He’s handsy—and a walking red flag. When Tommy outlaws sex in his house, Dakota refuses to spend time with Ainsley if they’re not hooking up. So it seems like the guy won’t even survive the first episode.
Tommy also spends a lot of time taking to his ex-wife, Angela (Ali Larter from Heroes), exclusively over FaceTime while he’s driving. James Jordan from Lioness is on this show, too. He’s a petroleum engineer named Dale, and one of Tommy’s housemates. A lawyer named Nate (Colm Feore from The Umbrella Academy) lives with him as well. They hang out in the kitchen and shoot the shit with ol’ Landman before he’s off to work.
What Does the Landman Do?
As is the case with Lioness season 2—another Sheridan series that is currently airing on Paramount+—the Yellowstone creator refuses to let the plot just naturally develop. Landman goes full throttle. Without warning, two smugglers rapidly attempt to move a ton of cocaine from a van to a small airplane as a massive truck barrels down the road toward them. The driver is dead with his foot on the gas, so he crashes into the airplane and blows the whole operation sky high. Dead bodies all over. Cocaine in the wind. A new problem for Landman to solve.
Tommy tells the local sheriff that the plane was stolen from their company weeks ago. Now Monty’s hiring fancy lawyers to fly in from the city and explain how one of their aircraft ended up in pieces as part of a failed drug-trafficking operation. Oh, and there’s also the dead guy from the truck. What was all that about?!
Meanwhile, the oil workers are spending the day hazing Tommy’s son. It’s Cooper’s first day on the job and he’s extremely green. He could have finished college and earned his degree in geology, but for some reason he dropped out to work in the oil field. Armando (Michael Peña), an oil crewman, picks him up at the crack of dawn with his buddies.
They take him to a drive-thru coffee stand called Babes N’ Brew, where girls in pink bikinis hand out black coffees to crewmen. Cooper orders a latte, so one of the girls calls him “an aristocrat.” The guys complain. “We don’t have time for a latte!” they yell as the cars behind them honk. “You just ordered the most complicated shit.” Cooper’s going to have to get used to regular ol’ coffee, even if he doesn’t like the taste. “It ain’t about the taste son, it’s about the fuel,” Armando’s uncle tells him. Then he throws Cooper’s latte out the window. I hope there’s a million more metaphors about oil on this show.
Later, they fuck with him some more by making him climb a tall tower. The gang teaches him incorrect Spanish phrases and laugh as he struggles to eat spicy food. You’ve seen this kind of character in Sheridan shows before. He has a Jimmy from Yellowstone vibe.
The next morning, something goes wrong at one of the oil rigs. They’re working on a pipe when Armando’s uncle realises he has the wrong-sized tool. He tells Cooper to head back to the truck and fetch it. Cooper isn’t sure which one is right, but the whole rig explodes when he turns back around. It’s safe to assume that everyone is dead. Cooper just witnesses it, helpless.
The oil-rig explosion is a perfect opening for Landman. It’s a simple problem for Tommy to show off what he actually does for a living, and it’s incredibly devastating. I can’t speak much on the whole plane-crash fiasco, because it feels like an insane problem to kick off the series. Hopefully, as Landman moves forward, we avoid the overcomplicated plots and get more to the heart of the show. Working on these oil rigs is hell on earth, and the Landman is hell’s warden.
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