Taylor Sheridan became one of TV’s most powerful creators with an epic saga set on a ranch, but his latest protagonist has little patience for agrarian fantasy. The landowner giving Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) a lecture isn’t really a rancher, the professional fixer argues: “You’re an oilman who spends the money we give you on cattle.” For his latest drama on Paramount+, Sheridan has turned his attention to the black, oozing lifeblood of his native Texas. “Landman” has the masculine bravado and conservative milieu of “Yellowstone,” Sheridan’s flagship red state soap opera, but also builds an immersive, detailed world in the sun-baked Permian Basin that anchors the show in observed reality.
That’s not a coincidence. Per Sheridan’s typical practice, the producer penned every script, but shares a creator credit with Christian Wallace, host of the Texas Monthly podcast “Boomtown” that serves as the series’ source material. Wallace spent time working on the oil fields himself, a firsthand experience that shows in Norris’ skilled maneuvering and the daily routine of his son Cooper (Jacob Lofland), who drops out of college to start grueling, dangerous work on the rigs.
“Landman” is strongest when using Thornton’s always-compelling screen presence to guide the viewer through the vagaries of the oil and gas industry, including potential alternatives and the looming threat of climate change. The first scene shows Norris negotiating a lease with a cartel soldier through the bag over his head, pointing out both are in the business of dealing highly addictive substances: “Ours is just bigger.” The exchange is a sensational, adrenalized way to verse the audience in unsexy subjects like the difference between surface and mineral rights.
Though he once captained a venture of his own, Norris now serves as a jack of all trades for the fictional M-Tex Oil, led by billionaire businessman Monty Miller (Jon Hamm). Monty spends his days in wood-paneled rooms and high-flying jets, while Tommy pounds the pavement managing day-to-day affairs. This endeavor takes “Landman” on a tour of the oil industry’s distinctive scenery: the sad McMansion Tommy shares as a rented bachelor pad with a couple M-Tex peers; the privately funded roads where cartels often “borrow” trucks or even planes while the owners look the other way; the coffee hut where an endless row of M-Tex pickups queues up at the drive-through each day before dawn.
Though jaded and fatigued, Tommy is still a swaggering cowboy in the Sheridan mode. He pronounces oil “uhl.” He chops off the tip of his pinky rather than deal with the surgeries required to fix his hand. He’s an alcoholic, but thinks Michelob Ultra doesn’t count. As is the screenwriter’s wont, Sheridan can push this tendency into the absurd: when told he has a mouth on him, Tommy doesn’t just fire back with, “That’s your wife’s favorite thing about me” — he also adds “other than my dick,” and flips the offender off for good measure. But Thornton is an ideal delivery device for dense monologues about the fallacy of “clean” energy, and sells a nonpartisan view of petroleum as a substance the world is dependent on and lacks the infrastructure to wean itself off of sustainably. Per Sheridan’s plausibly deniable, politically ambiguous MO, Tommy is a no-nonsense pragmatist, not an ideologue: if someone’s gotta drill, it might as well be him.
“Landman” is far less effective as a family drama, in part because the female characters are so uniformly lacking. (In this, “Landman” repeats the mistakes of “Special Ops: Lioness,” though in a manner less lethal to its core project.) As Tommy’s flirtatious ex-wife Angelica, Ali Larter gets to drawl one-liners and sport ostentatious outfits, but after the five episodes provided to critics, the character remains largely the emotionally erratic, gold-digging sexpot she’s introduced as. Their daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) is essentially Angelica’s mini-me, with an added leering fixation on her teenage sexuality. In a shocking comedown from her career-best work in “The Substance,” poor Demi Moore gets a paltry handful of lines as Monty’s wife Cami. Presumably the back half of the season will reveal why “Landman” bothered with an actress of Moore’s caliber for the role, but for now, her casting remains a mystery.
This deficit extends to Tommy’s professional sphere as well. (A bulldog of a lawyer assigned to investigate an onsite accident has Beth Dutton’s aggression and is just as one-note as Kelly Reilly’s “Yellowstone” antiheroine.) But for the show’s purposes, it’s most damaging to the attempts to cultivate the Norris family as a center of gravity to complement Tommy’s job. “The patch,” as most locals call the fields, are where “Landman” truly wants to be — though given the ubiquity of Spanish-speaking laborers there, it’s disappointing the show doesn’t make any of them a proper co-lead, or even give much of their dialogue subtitles. The closest we get is Michael Peña’s Armando, a sexist bully who torments his colleague Cooper.
“Landman” has conspicuous gaps, and some of the disjointedness that characterizes a TV empire with many offshoots and a single author. But these weak points are continually offset by an evocative sense of place not replicated by TV in this corner of the country since “Friday Night Lights.” (That series’ inspiration, the town of Odessa, is a frequently name-dropped location in “Landman.”) Even if the plot doesn’t entirely come together in the season’s first half, a well-constructed setting can buy a lot of time.
The first two episodes of “Landman” are now streaming on Paramount+, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays.