Ever since Yellowstone premiered in 2018, Taylor Sheridan has made himself into a TV mogul by making accessible stories with soapy situations and characters, then populates these shows with A-listers. The latest of these shows examines the oil industry in Texas, and not only has Billy Bob Thornton as its lead, but Demi Moore and Jon Hamm along for the ride.
LANDMAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: We hear someone breathing, then see the view from inside a burlap sack.
The Gist: Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) works for an oil company; his job is to secure signatures from people who own land where his company has mineral rights. The job is pretty stressful and is full of dangerous pitfalls, as we see when he’s being held captive by members of the cartel of the ranch where his company has mineral rights. They threaten to kill him, but he tells them that as long as they don’t disturb oil production, his company doesn’t care what they “produce” on the land. They’ll build roads for transport, and they’ll pay them for land they damage.
It’s stressful enough that as soon as he gets back to his truck, Tommy chain smokes and guzzles down a couple of Michelob Ultras. There are other things in his life that are stressful, like his still-very-involved ex-wife Angela (Ali Larter), who tells him that she’s sending their 17-year-old daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) to stay with him while she and her current husband are away.
She’s doing so because she doesn’t trust her to be alone with her high-school football phenom boyfriend, Dakota Loving (Drake Rodger). Of course, she just ends up bringing the boy with her, and Tommy demands that he and Ainsley share his bedroom and the phenom sleep on the couch.
Another stressor is that his son Cooper (Jacob Lofland) is spending his first day working for the company, with a job toiling on one of the oil-drilling pads. He’s with Luis Medina (Emilio Rivera) and his sons Armando (Michael Peña) and Craig (Adrian Hernandez); Tommy purposely paired Cooper up with Luis because he trusts that they’ll take care of his college-educated son. That doesn’t prevent them from pranking him on the first day, of course.
On the road to one of the company’s drilling sites, a plane hastily lands, and an SUV speeds up; as the plane starts offloading bundles of drugs, though, a tanker truck barrels through, colliding with the plane and SUV and causing a massive explosion. Tommy goes to the scene because the plane was stolen from the company earlier that month.
As he argues with the sheriff about whether the FAA or Tommy should have told law enforcement about the plane, all Tommy wants to do is get a temporary detour put in so the barrels of crude can keep on being sent off the ranch. He then calls the company’s owner, Monty Miller (Jon Hamm) and advises him on what kind of legal issues will be coming the company’s way because of this debacle. When Monty says to keep it out of the news, Tommy assures him, “A plane full of drugs being run over by an oil tanker ain’t news; that’s just another Monday.” (It’s the beginning of his work week, so he thinks it’s Monday.)
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Yellowstone but with oil.
Our Take: Created by Taylor Sheridan and Christian Wallace, Sheridan wrote and directed the first episode of Landman, which is based on the podcast Boomtown. When we say it’s “Yellowstone with oil,” we mean it. Yes, the whole idea of Tommy’s job securing the ability to drill on land where his company has mineral rights, and the power and greed in the oil industry, pervades the first episode. But at its heart, Landman is a soap on the same level as the first show that set Sheridan down the path of being TV’s latest creative mogul.
If you didn’t know what being a “landman” entails, you sure know by the end of the first episode, given all the speeches Tommy makes to explain his job and how the industry operates. He also gives a speech to Ainsley about knowing when a relationship is the “last one.” Let’s just say Thornton gets a lot of chances in the first episode to play to his strengths, which is being folksy, intense and profane all at the same time.
For a show that heavily promotes the fact that Hamm and Demi Moore (playing Monty Miller’s wife Cari) are starring alongside Thornton, the first episode showed very little of Hamm and nothing of Moore. It leads us to believe that, like in other Sheridan shows, he seems to keep big names in reserve until he figures out what to do with them in the story. In Tulsa King, for instance, Dana Delany is finally getting some good scenes in the show’s second season; Lioness had no idea how to use Nicole Kidman and Morgan Freeman until its second year, as well. So while it feels like Hamm and Moore are underutilized, we hope that Sheridan, Wallace and company have a plan to make their characters more significant down the road.
The rest of the first episode was entertaining enough, though we could have done without having both Larter’s and Randolph’s characters being portrayed more as sex objects and less as more complete characters. While seeing Larter’s Angela FaceTiming a stressed Tommy wearing a lacy “casual” top is amusing — and sexy, we won’t lie — it feels gratuitous. There are ways for the female characters in this show to be sexy without being looked at as objects, but it seems Sheridan would rather go for an easier, sexpot characterization.
All that being said, Billy Bob Thornton is one of those actors we’ll watch in pretty much anything he does, and it’s not just because he sounds like a more profane version of Henry Hill. He brings a level of gravitas to all of his roles, no matter how ridiculous. As Tommy, he may be under a lot of pressure and stress, and he constantly shakes his head at how he continues to kowtow to his ex and his daughter. But there’s also a supreme confidence in Tommy that very few actors could portray. Thornton, though, shows that confidence with ease.
Sex and Skin: No skin, but there is some sex talk (see below).
Parting Shot: A tragedy happens at the drilling pad where Cooper works.
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Demi Moore, because we’ve yet to see her. We think she shows up in the second episode.
Most Pilot-y Line: This is a line no dad wants to hear from his daughter: “As long as he never comes in me, he can come anywhere on me.”
Our Call: STREAM IT. Landman is pretty much a standard-grade Taylor Sheridan production, but Thornton makes it very watchable, even as he spends half of the first episode making speeches.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
