Landman is a dumb waste of a great premise

Shortly into the first episode of Landman, Billy Bob Thornton’s protagonist, Tommy Morris, is talking with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Ainsley, at a college football game. He’s just met her quarterback boyfriend, and Tommy asks her if they’re being careful having sex. She replies yes and that they have one rule they stick by. Apologies in advance.

“As long as he never cums in me, he can come anywhere on me,” she says. Thornton holds a comic frozen stare and excuses himself to get a Dr. Pepper.

It’s funny and crude and has been seen by millions on YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram Reels. But it does nothing to move the story along.

Two episodes later, Tommy has a monologue, explaining to a condescending big-city lawyer lady, Rebecca, why wind turbines are more environmentally harmful than oil drilling. This scene also has millions of views. And, like the last, it does nothing to push the plot forward or get you to know the characters. It’s just the Taylor Sheridan conservative version of an Aaron Sorkin monologue — and no less condescending or embarrassing.

Were it less transparent in its pandering, it’d be a satisfying monologue — as would the scene where Jon Hamm’s Monty shuts down a boardroom of fellow oil executives. But I already have Alex Epstein’s The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future on my bookshelf, and every minute spent pleasuring the audience for how correct their opinions are is one that needed to be spent telling an actual story, built around the premise of the show.

Because, ten episodes later, with an entire season of Landman behind me, I’m left feeling that nothing happened.

There was a lot of yapping, melodrama, droll quips and drone shots of oil fields, but the show didn’t have a plot, let alone progress it. There are deals and gang encounters and fights, but they may as well happen in a vacuum as they have no set-up or long-term consequences and are shoved between rambling conversational scenes. What happened to the investigation into the plane crash? Or the investigation into the rig explosion? What about the problem with the National Guard? These pop up, hang around for a bit, and then Tommy dispatches them with a searing tear down, and you never hear about them again. In the Landman, a clever barb is the cure for all ailments.

And it’s a shame because Landman has the best lead character I’ve seen in ages, a killer premise and moments — with pipe explosions, construction accidents and gang encounters — where the sheer danger of this world is stark and brutal, and you want to buy in. It could and should have been incredible, if only showrunner Taylor Sheridan — the man behind Yellowstone, Tulsa King and every other hit Paramount+ show — had been disciplined and written a real story. But he didn’t.

For the unfamiliar, Landman is a loose adaption of the podcast Boomtown, about a fixer for the oil business, played by Thornton, who spends his days handling the myriad of problems that spring up when you try to extract liquid gold. There are troublesome rights holders, the cartel operating in his territory and lawyers with knives out, and sometimes stuff explodes, and people die. Tommy works long days trying to beat shape into chaos, and when the show focuses on this, it’s great. Thornton delivers a career-best charismatic performance here, and Tommy is such a fun, dry, quippy character that you almost forget most of his scenes aren’t going anywhere and we’re just enjoying hearing him talk.

Despite his job, the show rarely actually shows Tommy sorting things. It starts strong but soon turns to a loop of someone calling Tommy with a problem, him telling them he’ll call back, and then giving them an over-the-phone line about how they should stop being a dumbass and do as he says. And then it cuts back to his wife and daughter at the gym working on their ass. And if that sounds crude, no, that’s what they say every time they’re at the gym.

Ali Larter gives it her all as the catty ex/wife Angela, but her plot line is a series of pointless circles and the character is puddle-deep. Why do I care about her divorce? Or her furnishing choices? Or the domestic drama around her cooking?

His daughter Ainsley’s storyline is no better. At first, you think the various scenes of hers at parties or pool sides and grinding on her boyfriend are setting up for a kidnapping — but no, it’s all wheel-spinning. And though the actress is older than I am, it’s uncomfortable watching a character so heavily sexualized who is supposed to be seventeen.

You could cut 90 percent of their scenes, and the show would be the better for it; not just because they serve no narrative purpose, but because they’re written in a comically shallow, sexist way. Every minute spent with these characters makes you like the show and its creators less.

The mantra behind Landman was seemingly poor priorities and wasted potential. Jon Hamm is an incredible, underutilized actor, and I was so excited to see him get a meaty role as the owner of an oil company. But he’s just a guy on the end of a phone call or in meetings or at fancy dinners, and then he has a medical issue, and he becomes a man in a hospital bed.

Demi Moore delivered last year’s best performance in The Substance, yet you only get about five seconds of her every few episodes, and Jerry Jones — the owner of the Dallas Cowboys — has more screen time. No, that’s not a joke. He gives a great monologue, to be fair, and acted his ass off, but still.

What do you get instead of scenes with Hamm and Moore? Dumb comedy of Tommy’s roommates being uncomfortable with his wife and daughter, and more ogling over them, and dumb side plots from them to fill in the time. Why is ten minutes per episode for the show’s second half spent on arranging a strip show for people at an old folks’ home? And every scene with Rebecca either exists for her to be a psychopathically ambitious and effective lawyer or a green-hearted, big-eyed lib who Tommy needs to sarcastically shut down. How can this character be both? Ask Sheridan, I don’t know.

The shame is that there’s an obvious plot structure the show could have used. One storyline would have shown Monty’s wheeling and dealing with governments, competitors and shareholders as he tries to push through a big deal; the second would have been on Tommy, handling the issues on the ground, the growing cartel problem, and preparing for the deal to go ahead; and the third would have been on Tommy’s son, Cooper, who’s learning the business from the ground up, and would have been similar enough to his story here, but paced differently.

Cooper’s side plot is excellent when he’s working on a crew, learning how the oil business operates from the ground up (alongside the audience), but Sheridan then instantly pivots his plot into yet more domestic drama. Because that’s what the show needed more of.

I love hearing Tommy’s quips, Thornton deserves awards for this performance, it’s fun to watch with your brain turned off and a beer in hand; but this is a dumb, lazily written show. It mistakes vulgarity for humor and sassy lines for good writing and thinks that stuffing a show full of side plots can compensate for lacking a plot, but it can’t. Maybe a second season can have an actual plot, moving forward from where this flatly finishes, with Moore’s character moving into the spotlight. But I doubt it.

I loved Sheridan’s earlier work, with Sicario, Hell or High Water and Wind River being particular stand-outs, but the millions have made him undisciplined. Yellowstone’s quality has dropped. Tulsa King went from incredibly entertaining in the first season to unwatchable in the second. And with Landman, he’s let a great promise rot. My only hope is it gets Billy Bob Thornton bigger roles again because the man deserves them.