Billy Bob Thornton has a heart of black gold in Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan’s latest show Landman. It’s an intensely contemporary power struggle set in the world of big oil, Eliza Janssen writes.
Landman: Season 1
It’s right there in the show’s title: playing a salt-of-the-earth crisis handler, Billy Bob Thornton is a man of the land, with a burnished heart of gold. Or black gold, rather, considering his gig involves wrangling the people problems of hugely cashed-up West Texas oil rigs. As Tommy Norris, Thornton explains it’s up to him to manage “the police and the press when the babies refuse to be sat”—his overgrown, cranky babies being everyone from suits like Jon Hamm’s oil titan Monty Miller, to low-level cartel crooks angling for their slice of the pie.
Tommy doesn’t just give civility the finger: in one scene he literally scrapes off the end of his damaged pinky, when a concerned surgeon warns him it’ll need to be amputated. Consarn yer red tape and rules! I’m a Landman, dadgummit! Thornton’s casting in the latest show from TV mogul Taylor Sheridan goes down smoother than a frosty Michelob Ultra on a hot Texas day (yes, there is indeed plenty of product placement in this show).
Compared to the dynastic scheming of Kevin Costner’s brutish patriarch in Yellowstone, or Sylvester Stallone’s caged brawn in the fizzier series Tulsa King, Landman is a rangier beast. The dialogue is alive with Coen-esque pearls of Southern wisdom. Once you’ve tuned into the show’s double-episode premiere, it’ll be hard to stop yourself from trying to mimic Tommy’s whipsmart, world-weary patois: “Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first”, he drawls in one tete-a-tete.
The family drama Tommy must navigate, too, has a springiness that helps to cut through all the talk of Texas tea and corporate barbarity. FaceTime calls from ex-wife Angela (a bawdy Ali Larter) punctuate Tommy’s drives across breathtaking open plains, adding a frisson of thwarted romance to each already-tense day. His kids are almost more difficult to handle than the belching pits of liquid cash, too: son Cooper (Jacob Lofland) is determined to test himself with backbreaking rig work in order to ascend to the boardroom, and daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) is presented as a conservative dad’s worst nightmare. Early storylines concerning her prized virginity, with sloooow pans up Randolph’s bikini-clad body, are the peak of the show’s astoundingly old-school values, Sheridan exploiting the underage character with one hand and delivering a shaming slap to salivating viewers with the other. (It should be noted with relief that while Ainsley is, troublingly, a teen girl dealing with her dad’s overprotective sighs and his friends’ ogling, Randolph is 27 years old.)
If all this domestic drama sounds like it verges on sitcom silliness, don’t worry: Landman offers plenty of firepower, too. Cooper’s clumsy assimilation into a family of migrant oil rig workers offers moments of action and more than a little tragic sentiment, the pilot episode ending in a five-alarm scene of explosive carnage. The perma-grimace on Tommy’s face belies the true, life-and-death stakes of his daily work, and Sheridan goes there in terms of delivering on the industry’s worst-case scenarios. He leaves his archetypal Stetson-hatted hero caught in a moral quagmire between uncaring, manicured bosses and empathetically drawn roughnecks, those with their boots on the hazardous ground.
Sheridan writes every episode of Landman’s first season, and his direction of these opening episodes doesn’t shy away from the inhumane realities of work which fuels an entire, broken country. One wonders if the show’s November release—so soon after an election where immigration over the US’s Southern border remained a point of divisive vitriol—clouds or clarifies its depiction of blue-collar Mexican-American families, dreaming of earning their way out of mortally threatening circumstances.
Moreso than Sheridan’s moody crown jewel Yellowstone, Landman feels like an intensely contemporary power struggle, even taking some of its old-fashioned, ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ conservative dogwhistles into account. Thornton was born to play a character like Tommy in a show like this—by contrast, Demi Moore’s subdued role, as Hamm’s glamorous wife Cami, feels a little small for her after the tour de force that was The Substance. The series was inspired by the podcast Boomtown, produced by Texas Monthly magazine, and its host Chris Wallace is credited here as a creator and producer.
Tellingly, each episode of the podcast ends with the disclosure that Texas Monthly owns interests in the oil and gas industries, even as listeners hear of shocking living conditions for workers and rising death tolls in the region’s Permian Basin. Repackaged to us with pathos and more than a little down-South humour, these true stories don’t just superficially influence the big picture Sheridan and Thornton are presenting: they land…man.
