Landman is a little too real for me
The latest Taylor Sheridan show continues his tradition of arguing that the villains of old Westerns actually had some great ideas if you think about it.
I’m a Texas boy, through and through. Always will be, there’s no way around it. The deepest known roots of my family tree go back five generations in Texas, with one branch living its entire American life in my hometown of Houston.
So when I say that Landman is an extremely authentic streaming TV show about Texas oil assholes, I want you to know that I come from a place of knowledge.
Landman is the latest offering from superstar writer/director Taylor Sheridan, currently dropping weekly on Paramount Plus. Sheridan broke out as a writer with Sicario in 2015 before creating Yellowstone, which became one of the most popular shows on television and has since earned him a blank check to create hit after hit for the small screen.
My mileage on Sheridan is a bit all over the place. I adored Sicario and his follow-up film, Hell or High Water, but his TV output has consistently put a bad taste in my mouth. His work seems to favor a more conservative outlook of American society. That’s not to say I reject the idea of conservative art on its own; make whatever the hell you want to make as long as you’re making it in good faith.
But the characters Sheridan creates to be the heroes of his shows are almost universally the type of folks who were the villains of every Western I grew up watching. Yellowstone and its prequel series, 1923 and 1883, follow the trials and tribulations of the Dutton family, a long and proud line of big cattle ranchers like the ones who terrorized homesteaders and caused Shane to return to his gunfighter ways.
And again, just because the main characters are the typical “bad guys” of other stories doesn’t mean we’re meant to believe in their actions (see: The Sopranos, The Godfather, Goodfellas, etc.). Now more than ever in this age of withering media literacy, it’s important to emphasize that following an immoral protagonist is not the same thing as endorsing their point of view.
But it’s the context that rubs me the wrong way. Sheridan situates his heroes in a position that makes me feel like we’re supposed to believe they’re right. In many of these cases, their actions are considered to be the only rational way to respond to the world we live in.
This type of thinking is painted beautifully in the third episode, where Billy Bob Thornton’s titular Landman character, Tommy Norris, drives past a collection of wind turbines on the way back from a site. In the car with him is a no-good, snake-in-the-grass city-slicker attorney (and hot lady) sent out to—horror of horrors!—hold somebody accountable for a series of OSHA violations and unfiled police reports that led to multiple gruesome deaths in the first episode.
The big city lawyer, in her subdued Clinton-brand pantsuit, makes a snide comment about renewable energy coming to replace the oil industry, so Billy Bob pulls over by the wind turbines to give her a look at them up close. Once amongst these spinning behemoths, Billy Bob informs this naive city lawyer from a big firm that these turbines actually power the equipment that pulls the oil out of the ground, since getting electricity out here by other means is too unworkable. Now that he’s stunned her into silence with this little factoid, Billy Bob launches into an anti-renewables speech that I have heard word-for-word out of the mouths of many people I’ve both worked for and been related to. Same good points, same uninformed points, same oversimplifications, same bad faith posture, all adding up to a very true assessment of why the oil & gas industry exists and why it will continue to chug along for a long, long time to come.
Then, in a bit of…can we call it irony if it’s this on the nose?...the snake-in-the-grass big city lawyer is frozen in place by an encounter with a rattlesnake in the grass. Billy Bob kills the rattlesnake with a shovel almost as an afterthought, expressing puzzlement as to why she didn’t just back away from the thing.
(By the way, that big city this lawyer hails from is Houston, where the majority of oil companies have their headquarters.)
That’s how boots-in-the-dirt real this show is, and how it continues to leave a bad taste in my mouth.
I can’t speak as much to the actual mechanics of working the oil fields of the Permian Basin in Midland-Odessa; all my interactions in oil & gas never required me to travel out there. But I know the people that Sheridan has crafted. I don’t quite think he’s always on their side in this tale. Yet the only people who seem to see the world as it actually is, and who have the capacity to operate successfully within it at all times, are Billy Bob Thornton’s beleaguered landman and his boss, Jon Hamm’s amoral supercapitalist independent oil company owner.
Hamm, for his part, is playing a character who’d get along fantastically well with Don Draper. We mostly find him sitting pretty in Dallas skyscrapers, fancy restaurants, country club golf courses, black tie awards dinners, and poolside at his mansion while his wife Demi Moore swims in the background. He’ll then have to walk through a labyrinthine set of well-appointed rooms to get to a private place where he can take a call from Billy Bob and advance the plot. Together, Billy Bob and Hamm paint the picture of the modern day Daniel Plainview, and they intend to drink the milkshakes of every person who has—or is in the way of—what they want.
Of particular weirdness to me is the comic relief of the show, which chiefly centers on subplots surrounding Billy Bob’s ex-wife and teenage daughter. This insane pair of characters seem to exist only to provide the caricatures of “hot mess bitch ex-wife” and “jailbait daughter,” complete with multiple old men lechers as the innocent bystanders in their antics. Then there’s the army of mildly incompetent or downright annoying waiters and bartenders, who seem to just be trying to do their jobs but are no match for Billy Bob’s witty dunks on their stupidity. So if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like inside the mind of a person who’s mean to waiters, you’ve got your answer.
So do I recommend Landman? I dunno. It’s a bit of a romp, the world is well-drawn and fully alive, and I can sense some kind of irony dripping off this production. However, I’m too well aware of the fact that there is a sizable portion of the population for whom this is their unironic outlook. I get the feeling that these conceptual frameworks are where the gap in American ideology has opened up, and it seems like this show is indicative of the sad truth that the gap will only get wider before it ever starts to close again. Add in some baffling character subplots and arch caricatures that feel ripped from the headlines of the Babylon Bee, and I’m not sure if I can hang in there.
“It is hard for power to enjoy or incorporate humor and satire in its system of control.”
— Dario Fo