Most TV writers would love to be Taylor Sheridan. Some might profess not to be fans – they might even be snobby about his work, claiming it to be vulgar and too popular with American conservatives – but plenty crave the status he now enjoys: he is more famous than his shows. What’s Landman? It’s the new Taylor Sheridan.
And it is very Taylor Sheridan. His dramas tend to centre on hard but wise men, tersely but sagely dealing with problems where violence and death are not far away. In Sheridan’s breakthrough, Yellowstone, Kevin Costner is a Montana rancher fighting to preserve old traditions that cause him endless strife, which he nobly bears. In Mayor of Kingstown, Jeremy Renner is a fixer playing all sides in a Michigan prison town to prevent full-scale war between the criminal gangs, cops and prisoners. In the relatively happy-go-lucky Tulsa King, Sylvester Stallone’s New York mobster introduces naive Oklahomans to the bitter realities of organised crime.
Landman fits this template, and stars Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris, the on-the-ground overseer of an oil-drilling operation in west Texas’s Permian Basin. It’s set more or less in the present day – the Permian oil rush is a real phenomenon that took hold about eight years ago – but is still the story of a man holding a moribund way of life together despite its inherent dangers, and in the face of interference from Sheridan’s regular bugbears: criminals, bureaucrats, annoying young people and the law. Oil country, especially when you’re that close to the Mexican border, is a semi-lawless place where canny common sense and a ruthless streak count for more than college degrees.
What really matters, though, is the ability to slam down a zinger. Sheridan is an able dramatist, but his real calling is as an epigrammatist, and in Landman he properly lets rip. Almost everything that Tommy – “a divorced alcoholic with $500,000 in debt, and I’m one of the lucky ones” – says is quoteworthy pith, as he metaphorically and sometimes literally fights fires in an industry where “there’s two types of people: dreamers and losers”. L’esprit d’escalier is not among his malaises.
So which fires is Tommy fighting? There are not one but two explosive catastrophes in the first episode, which mean he and his boss – Jon Hamm as gruff plutocrat Monty Miller, tightly suited and with a flash of rage leaking past his aviator shades – have a long to-do list. Asses must be covered. Rules must be bent.
Tommy’s major concern, however, is his family. His spoiled, trouble-magnet daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) is in town, causing chaos among Daddy’s housemates – fellow middle-aged oil men who are even more ratty and cynical than Tommy – by sashaying about in her knickers. Meanwhile, Tommy’s ex-wife, Angela (Ali Lartner), regularly video-calls him, ostensibly to check up on her children – they also have a son, Cooper (Jacob Lofland), a willowy black sheep who insists on working as a roughneck in one of Tommy’s crews, despite being manifestly unsuited to manual work – but really to engage in flirty love/hate banter with Tommy. Despite having left him for a man Tommy describes as “a fat-ass ATM”, there she is on his phone, taking a break from her latest poolside holiday to thrust her chest towards the lens and taunt him about what he’s lost. Tommy is unmoved: “Enjoy the beach,” he says, before he once again hangs up. “Your tits look great. Don’t get syphilis.”
You’ll gather that Landman’s portrayal of its women is … well, it’s what some of the target audience might describe as a harmless throwback to a time before ordinary, humbly grafting guys were castrated by wokery, but it often comes off as overly horny fantasy, aimed at men who know the world has passed them by. When Rebecca Savage (Kayla Wallace) arrives – a ballbreaker attorney from the big city who carries her handbag in the crook of her elbow – she falls foul of Tommy at their first meeting, when she objects to being referred to as “the lady” at a bar. “Oh, did I guess wrong?” says Tommy, sensing yet another rhetorical victory. “I’m so sorry, sir! And hats off to the plastic surgeon!”
Renewable energy, the anti-smoking lobby and fussy doctors also get it in the neck but, as usual with a Sheridan creation, the old-school values have an underdog morality at their core that makes Tommy and Landman difficult to hate. “When hammer hits nail, hammer wins,” is one of Tommy’s other homespun doozies – he’s referring to himself after a mishap at work that’s left him minus a fingertip, but he could be talking about the harsh, dirty oil game, where the wealthy go hog wild and the little people risk their lives. That world is starkly evoked, and it’s clear whose side Tommy is on. For a purveyor of gritty homilies like Taylor Sheridan, meanwhile, oil is a rich new fuel.
• Landman is on Paramount+.
