For these unfamiliar, a landman is the public-facing facet of an oil firm’s manufacturing staff; 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 entails, of all issues, negotiating a land cope with a Mexican drug gang whereas tied to a chair with a bag over their head. If that sounds slightly 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 effectively with few new or fascinating 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 means out of. “If the entire world went electrical tomorrow, it will 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 an enormous 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 sort of tell-it-like-it-is conservatism that appears like honey popping out of Thornton’s mouth however turns to mud when it hits the mind. “Do not fake that I offend you,” he tells one farmer within the first episode after making one among many off-color remarks.
“Landman” runs on the tempo of an oil derrick, lumbering slowly from one branching plot thread to the subsequent. 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 largely 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 desires 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 come back crawling again to her past love; 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 got 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 usually used for punchlines or the topic of one among 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” really looks like a bone thrown to the recliner-chair dad who would not like how issues are altering lately.
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 flawed bathe. What’s extra, the stakes are so subterranean you virtually must 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. Greatest transfer on to the subsequent effectively.
5 episodes screened for evaluation. Collection streams on Paramount Plus.
