Landman

The Slick and the Dead

Taylor Sheridan has always had a feel for a particular American fatigue. Not end-of-day tiredness, but that deeper worn-out feeling of knowing the game is crooked and showing up anyway because the bills won't pause for your enlightenment. *Landman* plants that mood right away. Instead of giving us frontier grandeur, Sheridan opens with his lead hooded and tied to a chair, matter-of-factly haggling land rights with a Mexican drug cartel. He isn't terrified. Mostly, he seems irritated.

That lead is Tommy Norris, and Billy Bob Thornton plays him with the stale-smoke resignation of someone whose bad decisions have aged into routine. Tommy is a "landman" for a West Texas oil company, which really means fixer, errand-runner, damage sponge. He keeps the crude moving, the roughnecks breathing, and his billionaire boss—Jon Hamm, very comfortable at a distance from consequences—buffered from the wreckage required to make money. Sheridan swaps the horseback mythology of his earlier shows for the rusting industrial skeleton of the Permian Basin, and the trade helps. Everything looks sun-blasted, flat, and hostile. Oil derricks claw at the horizon. The palette is all dust and jaundice. You can nearly feel grit between your teeth.



Thornton is the whole engine. He's always had a face that looks like it has seen too much, but here he turns that frailty into method. In the quieter scenes—leaning against a truck, conserving motion—he seems to ration energy the way other men ration cash. Sheridan's dialogue still comes in those long, bitter riffs about green hypocrisy and the cruel necessity of fossil fuels, and Thornton knows how to make them sound less like speeches than exhausted observations. As *The Guardian* put it, Sheridan becomes more "epigrammatist" than dramatist here, and Thornton bites into those lines like they taste familiar. He doesn't dominate rooms by booming. He makes people come closer.

*Landman* is also undeniably a mess. Sometimes it's a grimy labor drama; other times it swerves into a strangely horny 1980s soap and stays there too long. The women circling Tommy—most obviously his ex-wife Angela (Ali Larter) and their teenage daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph)—are written with baffling thinness. Too often, they exist to derail scenes, test Tommy's patience, or inject melodrama from an entirely different show. (And I still can't shake how uncomfortable the camera's gaze on Ainsley feels. It keeps pulling attention away from the story instead of deepening it.)



Whenever the show gets back to the patch, though, it locks in. Sheridan clearly respects the men doing the dangerous physical work that keeps everything humming. We spend long stretches with roughnecks, including Tommy's son Cooper (Jacob Lofland), around massive equipment that looks one mistake away from killing somebody. The sound work sells it: metal screaming, drills pounding, combustion roaring in the background like weather. The place feels lethal. It makes immediate sense why these guys drink hard and burn out young.

Whether you can live with the politics will probably decide the whole experience for you. The series has no interest in solving climate collapse or apologizing for the business it depicts. It just points at the dirt, the money, the broken bodies, and asks you to sit with the cost attached to your commute.



By the end of season one, *Landman* doesn't play like a hymn to oil barons so much as a bleak little tragedy about middle management. Tommy Norris knows exactly how the world works and owns none of it. He absorbs the punishment, wipes up the spill, and lights another cigarette. It's ugly work. Thornton makes it weirdly compelling.