“Landman” Goes Down Like a Michelob Ultra

Oil and masculinity: both are oftentimes crude, both are considered toxic in the twenty-first century. So it only makes sense that the two are as tightly bound as a bolt on a rig in “Landman,” the latest hit series from the neo-Western television auteur Taylor Sheridan, on Paramount+. At the center of the show is Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton), a grizzled and cynical but ultimately good-hearted consigliere to a reckless oil-field billionaire, Monty Miller (Jon Hamm). Where Sheridan’s expansive “Yellowstone” franchise focusses on the landowning class, “Landman” depicts the considerably less glamorous world of a middleman toiling for the rich. Tommy drives his dun-colored Ford F-350 pickup truck, emblazoned with Monty’s M-Tex company logo, across the dusty, flat expanse of the West Texas Permian Basin, nicknamed the Patch. His job as the titular landman is to secure leases for oil extraction, to manage crews of roughnecks, and to deal with local government and police. As he races to solve a pileup of crises—leaking oil pumps, encroaching drug cartels, mysterious highway crashes—he is the show’s existentialist antihero, equipped mainly with wits and cigarettes and Thornton’s sardonic fluency with expletives. In “Landman,” oil pollutes the landscape just as machismo pollutes the soul, resulting in feuds, beatdowns, and broken families. But in Sheridan’s telling the toxicant is also a salve: oil leads to wealth, and wealth enables escape from the oil fields; masculine posturing, judiciously deployed, leads to power over other men as well as the grudging respect of certain uppity women who have the temerity to become lawyers or chief executives.

To a traditional prestige-TV viewing audience, “Landman” ’s politics are noxious. The show is nakedly anti-environmentalist; in one infamous scene from the first season, Tommy makes the factually absurd argument that wind turbines are just as bad, if not worse, for the planet than oil wells. The screenwriting plays fast and loose with sexist stereotypes; Tommy’s ex-wife, Angela (played by Ali Larter), with whom he rekindles a relationship, is a kind of red-state Manic Pixie Dream MILF, flaunting her cleavage, giving road head, and acting crazy when she’s getting her period. (“I need a Midol and a fuckin’ margarita,” she whines in one of the many hit-or-miss one-liners that punctuate the script’s more naturalistic dialogue.) But something about “Landman” has made it a sleeper hit even among a liberal audience, particularly with the recent launch of Season 2. The show is whispered about cautiously, lest one’s enthusiasm cause offense: I’m kind of . . . into it?? My colleague Inkoo Kang wrote in August that its initial season demonstrated “how conservative shows might be a damn good time.”

Part of the appeal lies in getting a voyeuristic glimpse into the workings of a specialized industry awash in money, not unlike how watching “Succession” provided a behind-the-scenes view of media mergers. We see the profit-sharing splits of oil leases, the refurbishing of old wells, and the lobbying confabs where wealthy owners in cowboy hats make handshake agreements. “Landman” is based on the reported podcast “Boomtown,” whose creator, Christian Wallace, is the series’ co-creator, giving its portrayals of the oil trade a journalistic frisson. The show’s aesthetic choices also complicate its seeming enthusiasm for extractive capitalism. Drone shots depict barren land studded with eternally spinning pumpjacks silhouetted against sunset haze, bringing to mind an Edward Burtynsky photograph or a Werner Herzog documentary. The soundtrack intersperses recognizable country hits with sweeping ambient guitar compositions by Andrew Lockington that are reminiscent of the post-rock band Explosions in the Sky. These artsy flourishes are the drizzle of artisanal jus on the plotline’s chicken-fried steak, mingling their flavors to the benefit of both.

Ultimately, the show’s success may come down to the charismatic force of its central character, who crystallizes the mood of our moment. Thornton, as the indebted and alcoholic Tommy, pulls hangdog faces and looks as exhausted with the state of the world as the rest of us feel. Thornton embraces the physical realities of late middle age to an extent that seems almost daring–his skin sallow, his beard scrubby, his worn-in clothes practically wafting sweat and oil and tobacco fumes through the screen. Nothing about him is aspirational save his attitude of charming fatalism. As he laments early in Season 2, after he has been tortured and nearly killed by drug smugglers run amok on Monty’s land, “Life pulled out its big dick and beat me over the head with it.”