Landman review: Like Yellowstone, but with more oil and less promise

In a 2022 interview, producer David Glasser described Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan as a “first-draft writer,” noting, “What he puts out is what we shoot. When he turns a script in, that’s it.” Glasser has produced every one of Sheridan’s shows over the last six years, beginning with Yellowstone and extending all the way to his latest offering, the Billy Bob Thornton-led oil drama Landman. His collaborations with Sheridan give him more knowledge of the TV titan’s creative process than most, so there seems to be no reason not to take him at his word. When Sheridan’s shows work, they even feel like the best possible version of a “first-draft” drama: instinctual, unsentimental, lived-in, and just about the opposite of fussed-over.

As Sheridan has taken on a greater workload in recent years, though, his already formulaic dramas have begun to feel less and less like just first-draft shows and more and more like rough-draft ones. This is, perhaps, an inevitable evolution. Not only is Sheridan currently attached to at least five ongoing series, but he’s also the sole writer and an occasional director on many of them. Landman, which premieres today on Paramount+, is his most unpolished effort to date. Like many of Sheridan’s projects, the series has all the necessary elements to really, truly sing, but none of the focus. It’s a drama about a man who does not like to be questioned made by a writer who, in this case, desperately needed someone — anyone — to at least try to reign him in.

Landman begins in the tensest of circumstances. It first finds Tommy Norris (Thornton), a crisis fixer for billionaire oil baron Monty Miller (Jon Hamm), tied to a chair in a desert warehouse owned by a drug cartel. When the region’s cartel leader enters the building, he does so with every intention of shooting Tommy in the head — or worse. Like many of Sheridan’s male protagonists, though, Tommy has a steely resolve and a confidence in not only the power of his corporate American employer, but also his own ability to talk himself out of any situation. Lo and behold, that’s exactly what he does. He smashes through his cartel captor’s coldhearted arrogance by cutting a deal that allows them to continue running their drug business out of West Texas and lets Monty capitalize on the mineral rights he owns to the oil beneath the land’s dry surface.

This negotiation is just one of many crises Monty is forced to resolve over the course of Landman‘s first five episodes, which were the only installments provided early to critics. He handles all of them in more or less the same way — namely, by either physically taking care of them himself or by explaining in the most condescending manner why they need to be addressed his way to whomever opposes him, whether it be the penny-pinching Monty or a young causality lawyer named Rebecca Savage (Kayla Wallace), who is sent to Texas to determine if Tommy is a potential liability to his boss. Rebecca is quickly established as both a legal shark and an environmentalist, but all it takes is a monologue from Tommy about the all-encompassing purposes of the oil industry to win her to his side. Sheridan’s shows have always felt like modern, high-end versions of ’80s soap operas like Dallas, and by setting up a potential romance between Tommy and Rebecca, Landman certainly doesn’t break that pattern.

Tommy’s occupation is, to Sheridan’s credit, exactly the kind of narrative engine that can power a potentially long-running series, and Thornton is more than up to the task of leading Landman. The actor is at his most charismatic and unscrupulous as Tommy, a character who could make for a fascinating TV anti-hero if, well, Sheridan didn’t clearly like him so much. Thornton’s talent does a lot to offset the repetitive nature of Tommy’s scenes, but Landman stops itself from exploring or developing his character in any kind of meaningful way by treating him as if he really is right about everything. In one early episode, he responds to a perfectly reasonable moment of heartbreak and disappointment for his ex-wife Angela (a bulldozing Ali Larter) by asking her what stage of her menstrual cycle she’s in, and Landman acts as if he’s completely right to do so. It’s almost as if Sheridan is too afraid of disrupting Landman‘s cowboy swagger to ever let Tommy be wrong.

Landman‘s problems do not start and end with its one-note, one-sided depiction of its protagonist. Jon Hamm, one of TV’s finest actors, is perpetually underused in a role that asks him to just repeatedly answer Tommy’s calls and then decide through gritted teeth how he wants to handle his company’s latest expense. Hamm is always compelling onscreen, but by the time Monty has spent his third-straight episode doing nothing more than answering phone calls, even he starts to struggle to bring much life to his scenes. He isn’t nearly as wasted by Landman as Demi Moore, who plays Monty’s wife. In a year when she has rightly received some of the loudest acclaim of her career for her performance in The Substance, Moore might as well be a background extra here.

The only saving grace of Moore’s non-role is that she’s spared the same cartoonish treatment as Angela, who is written as hypersexualized and overemotional and whom Larter has to use all of her energy to save from being completely insufferable. The show somehow does even worse by Ainsley (Michelle Randolph), Tommy and Angela’s 17-year-old daughter. She arrives in Landman‘s pilot as a young girl visiting her father for the weekend with her football-player boyfriend, but when they break up, she decides to stay with Tommy. This decision leads to multiple scenes in which Ainsley walks around Tommy’s house in nothing but a bathing suit or underwear — causing Tommy’s middle-aged roommates, Nathan (Colm Feore) and Dale (James Jordan), to panic over how attractive they find her. One bizarre scene sees Dale walk in on her as she’s showering, while nearly every other scene involving her includes shots and camera pans that purposefully objectify Randolph and paint her character as little more than a sexpot to be ogled.

These scenes are all deeply regressive, and Sheridan does himself no favors by further depicting both Angela and Ainsley as clueless women who can’t think about anything other than the men in their lives. They are, to put it kindly, thinly written, as are many of the subplots Landman uses to pad out its runtimes. That’s particularly true of a storyline involving Cooper (Jacob Lofland), Tommy and Angela’s son, who drops out of college in order to start working at his dad’s oil company, and Ariana (Paulina Chavez), the widow of a deceased crewman who strikes up a friendship with Cooper because she doesn’t have anyone else in her life willing to help her sort through the wreckage of her husband’s death. Their relationship is illogical to the point of seriously stretching credulity, and Landman only uses it to cause extraneous problems for Cooper.

The most frustrating thing about Landman is that it contains the bones of a fun, immersive drama about an industry that — despite its cultural and economic power — hasn’t been explored onscreen nearly as deeply as it could be. There are moments, like Cooper’s first day working with a veteran crew, when Landman comes close to being exactly that. But the show is too unfocused and unrefined to actually reach its full potential. It feels like it was written in a weekend by Sheridan, and it is full of all the head-scratching moments of would-be comedic relief and lazy characterizations that entails (in the span of a single episode, at least two characters pointedly describe themselves out loud as “goal-oriented” people). There’s a good series lying beneath the surface of Landman, but right now it lacks the power and focus it needs to actually dig down and find it.

Landman premieres Sunday, November 17 on Paramount+. Digital Trends was given early access to the series’ first five episodes.

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