Slate Article: Landman Is the Perfect Show for Our Times

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Taylor Sheridan, the most overextended man in television, has done it again. Landman, according to the internal metrics at Paramount+, is the most watched original show the streamer has ever had. (The top five spots are all held by other Sheridan series—1923, Tulsa King, Lioness, and 1883. Remember, Yellowstone proper is on Peacock.) The West Texas–set story, which stars Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris, an all-purpose problem solver for a fictional oil company owned by Monty Miller (Jon Hamm), has also developed a bit more of a critical halo than Sheridan’s other TV ventures, popping up on best-of-2024 lists, edging into mainstream discourse via podcasts that typically cover more-prestige fare, and retaining a score of 80 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. And the week before Landman wrapped up, this past Sunday night, its lead actor, Billy Bob Thornton, attended the Golden Globes as a nominee for his role in the series.

All of this proves that Landman—a show that is 75 percent a mess—is one of the luckiest entertainment products in recent memory. It launched at the perfect time, right at the crest of the post-2020 vibe shift that sometimes feels a whole lot like a backlash. The show is loosely adapted from Boomtown, a popular Texas Monthly podcast by journalist Christian Wallace, which came out in late 2019. Boomtown is thoughtful, and its politics are inconclusive. Its episodes find a bunch of different ways to ask how oil’s being up, then down, then up again has affected the people who live in the American Southwest’s Permian Basin. Wallace interviews ranchers, sex workers, teachers at local high schools, and the women who work at drive-thru coffee stands, clad in scanty outfits, caffeinating oil field workers who stop by in the predawn black.

That last bit did make it into the Sheridan show—how could he resist?—but in general, it’s very funny to imagine Landman fans listening to Boomtown, hoping to keep the feeling alive. Landman sprawls in some of the same way as its source material, and there are moments when the human toll of boom and bust comes to the fore, but it’s popular partly for its bombast and certainty. Sheridan’s vision of what oil is all about—a grubby business, but necessary for the functioning of modern life—is extremely annoying to any viewer who knows something about renewable energy and climate change. For people who hate liberals, that’s a lot of fun.

Landman is full of just-so stories about “how the world works,” according to oil people, mostly the very watchable Tommy. These speeches, delivered by main characters to listening liberals, are a Sheridan specialty, and they always sound as if they could be transcribed and posted as blocks of text on X. (Think of how Beth Dutton, in Yellowstone’s Season 5, lectures a professor who tries to hit on her in a bar, ripping him a new one for undermining the middle class for daring to move to Montana.) One such Tommy rant, about the energy used to make wind turbines, opened the season, and another, about fracking, closes it, but in between we also get other lectures about how little liberals understand the real world, delivered at many oil company luncheons and meetings.

Each of Tommy’s rants happens in conversation with Rebecca, a deeply confusingly written character played by Kayla Wallace. Rebecca is a beautiful young lawyer who uses “woke” ideas about sexual harassment to threaten people, steals valor by making up a dad who was an Army Ranger in order to gain advantage during a negotiation, and also somehow harbors environmental beliefs, despite having signed on to work for an oil company. In the season finale, Tommy lectures Rebecca: “You can throw your phone away and trade that Mercedes in for a bicycle or a horse and start hunting for your own food and living in a tent, but you’ll be the only one, and it won’t make a damn bit of difference. Plus, I hear the moral high ground gets real windy at night.” (“Reality hits hard,” one X user crowed, posting the clip.)

Rebecca is a terrible character whose presence on the show tells you a lot. Sheridan, who famously writes alone, and sometimes seems as if he shouldn’t, sticks some of the worst women in the world into the world of Landman. Tommy’s ex-wife, Angela, played by Ali Larter, and his teenage daughter Ainsley, played by Michelle Randolph, are supposed to be comic relief—a beautiful, aging trophy wife and her trophy-wife-in-training daughter, who annoy and harass Tommy daily. Angela goes to the gym, drinks, shops, and calls Tommy over FaceTime, nagging him to be home early. She has no idea what his job is like, despite having known him for decades; she puts together elaborate dinners and asks tired men to eat paella from a single dish with wooden spoons; she appoints herself the de facto entertainment director of a nursing home without asking anyone who works there if they’re OK with it. Every time Angela calls Tommy on the phone, his device plays a horror-movie jump-scare sound effect, and he makes a frustrated noise before answering. The problem is, the viewers feel that way too: Oh, God—not Angela.

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