For these unfamiliar, a landman is the public-facing aspect of an oil firm’s manufacturing group; their job is to safe leases and mineral rights for oil drilling. As Taylor Sheridan‘s umpteenth present for Paramount Plus would have you ever imagine, it is a cutthroat job that includes, of all issues, negotiating a land take care of a Mexican drug gang whereas tied to a chair with a bag over their head. If that sounds just a little ridiculous, that is as a result of it’s, however Sheridan’s new present “Landman”—which reads as “Yellowstone” for North Texas—stumbles out of an already-tapped properly with few new or attention-grabbing concepts to plumb.
Primarily based loosely on the serial documentary podcast “Boomtown,” “Landman” positions West Texas as a brand new frontier for avarice—roughnecks flock there to construct new drills and oil derricks, and executives scramble for possession of what black gold stays out on the plains. Oil, the present purports, is the lifeblood of the American life-style, a satan’s cut price that even savvy landmen cannot speak their method out of. “If the entire world went electrical tomorrow, it might take thirty years” to cease being depending on oil, Tommy tells a bleeding-heart regulatory lawyer (Kayla Wallace) despatched to guage his operation.
Channeling a corn-fed model of his character from Prime Video’s “Goliath,” Billy Bob Thornton steps into the cowboy boots and straw hat of Tommy Norris, a no-nonsense landman who spends his days placing out fires (each literal and metaphorical) for a giant oil firm run by Jon Hamm‘s golf-playing tycoon Monty Miller. Just like the oil he secures, Tommy is crude to a fault; he is brusque, surly, and stuffed with the type of tell-it-like-it-is conservatism that feels like honey popping out of Thornton’s mouth however turns to mud when it hits the mind. “Do not faux that I offend you,” he tells one farmer within the first episode after making considered one of many off-color remarks.
“Landman” runs on the tempo of an oil derrick, lumbering slowly from one branching plot thread to the following. Once we’re not targeted on Tommy or Monty, we’ll float over to Tommy’s son, Copper (Jacob Lofland), who’s chosen to take a grunt-level job with the roughnecks who construct the rigs. Cue jokes about his Mexican teammates razzing him about ordering a latte from the native Dunkin, however that is principally all it is good for, other than filling time with the fallout from an oil rig explosion that feels manufactured to shock the viewers with shock deaths.
Bafflingly, “Landman” additionally needs to be an interpersonal household drama—assume “Dallas (Taylor’s Model)”—which is the place Sheridan’s most noxious conservative streak comes out. When Tommy’s not wheeling and dealing, he is fretting about his oversexed, nymphomaniac ex, Angela (performed with MILF-y broadness by Ali Larter, who’s no less than having enjoyable), and his shallow teenage daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph). The previous is bored of her rich new husband and desires to return crawling again to her old flame; in the meantime, the latter is positioned as a spoiled, do-nothing brat who takes after her mom’s sex-forward strategies of persuasion. (“We’ve a rule,” Ainsley innocently tells her father of her football-player husband. “So long as he would not cum in me, he can come wherever on me.”)
The characters are such broad varieties, and so typically used for punchlines or the topic of considered one of Thornton’s baleful head shakes, that one can not help however ponder whether the present simply hates sex-positive ladies. Between that and its swaggering bromides about lattes, twerking, and environmentalism, “Landman” actually looks like a bone thrown to the recliner-chair dad who would not like how issues are altering today.
The drama is limp, and the out-of-nowhere jokes make it even worse; it is wild to have a young household scene get interrupted by deadpan sitcom jokes or crash-zoom farces about folks wandering into the improper bathe. What’s extra, the stakes are so subterranean you virtually should frack for them, which makes every 50-minute episode run by at a snail’s tempo. Thornton’s sleepy truth-teller pulls a lot of his scenes collectively together with his magnetic drawl, however the remainder of the solid feels on autopilot. Sheridan, it appears, is tapped out, and there is not a lot ink left to mine from his pen. Finest transfer on to the following properly.
5 episodes screened for overview. Sequence streams on Paramount Plus.
