Taylor Sheridan’s super successful “Yellowstone” has been compared to “Dallas,” the grandaddy of primetime soap operas, often enough. So why wouldn’t Sheridan take a stab at his own Texas-set, oil industry melodrama?
“Landman” is that. And what’s pleasantly surprising about this Permian Basin blend of big business brinkmanship, family conflict and horrific on-the-job accidents is that it’s so damn funny.
Most of the laughs are intentional, too. A rich deposit of them should be credited to star Billy Bob Thornton, who can deliver astute lessons in petrochemical economics one minute then tell a bartender “I quit drinkin’, I’ll stick with beer” the next. The “Goliath” and “Bad Santa” star maintains exasperation in his drawl throughout and doesn’t waste a second resetting tone from heartfelt to pissed off to sarcastic, reliably punctuating all of it with redolent cusswords.
Tommy Norris is a perfect conveyor belt for the actor’s bristling intelligence, redneck charm and instinctual subversiveness. Tommy is the title landman, an on-the-ground oil patch manager tasked with everything from negotiating drilling leases with Mexican drug cartels to doing his best to see that widows of burned alive rig workers are somewhat compensated.
Midland-based Tommy works for a small but lucrative outfit, MTex Oil. The owner, Fort Worth businessman Monty Miller (Jon Hamm) and his wife Cami (Demi Moore) don’t have a whole lot to do in the first five episodes Paramount+ provided to critics. But you hardly miss them, what with all the drama — and dramedy — Tommy has to deal with every living second of every, 90 degree-plus spring day.
There’s his moody college dropout son Cooper (Jacob Lofland), who insists on joining roughneck crews his father (and soon most viewers) know are more dangerous than the rattlesnakes beheaded throughout the season. The character is our guide into something the show does well: depicting the hard work and applied technology of oil extraction. Lofland plays Cooper as the piece’s most serious character, and he’s a pill. Even when luckless but lovely Ariana (Paulina Chávez) takes a shine to him, Cooper hardly knows what to do beyond mow her yard and fight with her relatives, many of whom he works with.
Tommy’s 17-year-old daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph from Sheridan’s lesser spinoff series “1923”) visits for what turns out to be a perpetual spring break. The bubbly blonde is congenitally incapable of wearing much more than a bikini — and often less, much to the discomfort of the other old guys her dad shares a not-big-enough company house with: James Jordan’s gruff petroleum engineer Dale and Colm Feore’s fidgety attorney Nathan.
She gets it from her mother, Ali Larter’s incorrigibly provocative Angela. Following an oil patch bust (Tommy notes he’s still half a million dollars in debt), Angela left the man she’s still hot for and remarried a hotel magnate. She shows up in Midland with the latter’s credit card — How do you like my $450K Western style remodel of your corporate frat house, Boys? — and determined to wrestle Tommy back into submission both in and out of the bedroom. Angela’s a laugh-and-a-half, and so far Larter’s dropped a few hints that she intends to make the character fully human. Whether or not that would be a shame depends on one’s enjoyment of her bigger-than-life antics.
Tommy has one other female problem, who is also a lawyer problem. Kayla Wallace (“When Calls the Heart”) plays a sharp-dressed corporate shark, rather unimaginatively named Rebecca Savage. She’s flown in from the big city to manage the numerous actionable disasters MTex keeps suffering under the landman’s watch. The smart, starchy Millennial, who takes offense at every good ol’ boy thing about oilmen, is probably there to scapegoat Tommy, too.
Can he win her over — and loosen her up — with his High Plains wisdom and one of those rattler decapitations? Hope so, because Wallace is too good a performer to remain a snooty stereotype.
Co-created with Texas Monthly journalist Christian Wallace (no relation to the actress, I’m assuming) and based on his “Boomtown” podcast, Sheridan’s latest series feels authentic despite a relentless gusher of tried-and-true entertainment gambits. While there’s a pro-fossil fuels bent to the discourse, almost every defense of the polluting enterprise is quickly counter-argued or undercut in some way. It’s smart, even informative, stuff.
But the show isn’t always as clever as its makers think. Many of the laugh lines feel overwritten and aren’t the only bits here that are as sexist as Texas is big. But the actresses clearly have a ball with them despite that.
When Ainsley complains to her mom, “How could he? She’s a f—ing brunette!” about an ex’s new squeeze, Randolph fully commits to the lame line and more than earns the laugh. That’s just the way the girls are down here in Texas, to quote the Ry Cooder/Flaco Jimenez recording which Sheridan seems to have taken as gospel.
Love or wince at some dialog, though, “Landman” is a triumph of enjoyable performances. It’s also a good example of incident-loaded plotting that’s grounded in workaday grit. Just when you think things are getting either too contrived or on-the-nose, a scene so intriguing or simply well done puts a smile on your face. It’s the TV equivalent of driving a gas guzzler without guilt.
“Landman” premieres Sunday, Nov. 17, on Paramount+.