Taylor Sheridan Oil Drama captivates
Taylor Sheridan became one of TV’s most powerful creators with an epic saga set on a ranch, but his latest protagonist has little patience for agricultural fantasy. The landowner lecturing Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) isn’t really a rancher, the professional fixer argues: “You’re an oilman who spends the money we give you on cattle.” For his latest drama on Paramount+, Sheridan has turned his attention to the black, oozing lifeblood of his native Texas. “Countryman” has the manly bravado and conservative milieu of “Yellowstone,” Sheridan’s flagship red-state soap opera, but also builds a compelling, detailed world in the sun-drenched Permian Basin that anchors the show in perceived reality.
That’s no coincidence. In Sheridan’s typical practice, the producer wrote each script but shares creator credits with Christian Wallace, host of the Texas Monthly podcast “Boomtown,” which serves as source material for the series. Wallace himself spent time working in the oil fields, a firsthand experience evidenced by Norris’s skillful maneuvering and the daily routine of his son Cooper (Jacob Lofland), who drops out of college to take on grueling and dangerous work on the rigs to start.
“Landman” is at its strongest when it uses Thornton’s always compelling screen presence to guide the viewer through the vagaries of the oil and gas industry, including possible alternatives and the looming threat of climate change. The first scene shows Norris negotiating a lease with a cartel soldier through the bag over his head, pointing out that both are involved in trafficking highly addictive substances: “Ours is just bigger.” The exchange is a sensational, adrenaline-fueled way to introduce the public to unsexy topics like the difference between surface rights and mineral rights.
Although he was once in charge of his own company, Norris now serves as a jack-of-all-trades for the fictional M-Tex Oil, led by billionaire businessman Monty Miller (Jon Hamm). Monty spends his days in wood-paneled rooms and high-flying airplanes, while Tommy pounds the pavement taking care of the day’s business. This venture takes “Landman” on a tour of the oil industry’s distinctive landscape: sad McMansion Tommy shares a rented bachelor pad with a few M-Tex colleagues; the privately funded roads where cartels often “borrow” trucks or even planes while the owners look the other way; the coffee shack where an endless line of M-Tex pickup trucks line up at the drive-through every day before sunrise.
Though jaded and tired, Tommy is still a swaggering cowboy in Sheridan mode. He pronounces oil”uh.” He cuts off the tip of his little finger rather than perform the surgeries needed to repair his hand. He is an alcoholic, but thinks Michelob Ultra doesn’t count. As the screenwriter is wont to do, Sheridan can push this tendency to the point of absurdity: when told he has a mouth on him, Tommy doesn’t just fire back with, “That’s your wife’s favorite thing about me”—he adds also adds: “except my dick,” and throws the perpetrator away for good measure. But Thornton is an ideal vehicle for dense monologues about the fallacy of “clean” energy, selling an unbiased view of oil as a substance the world depends on and that lacks the infrastructure to sustainably phase itself out. In Sheridan’s plausibly deniable, politically ambiguous MO, Tommy is a no-nonsense pragmatist, not an ideologue: if anyone has to drill, it might as well be him.
“Countryman” is far less effective as a family drama, in part because its female characters are so uniformly lacking. (In this, “Landman” repeats the mistakes of “Special Ops: Lioness,” albeit in a way that’s less fatal to the core project.) As Tommy’s flirtatious ex-wife Angelica, Ali Larter gets to drawl one-liners and wear flashy outfits. , but after the five episodes provided to critics, the character largely remains the emotionally erratic, gold-digging sexpot she was introduced as. Their daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) is essentially Angelica’s mini-me, with an added leering fixation on her teenage sexuality. In a shocking comedown from her best work in “The Substance,” poor Demi Moore gets a paltry handful of lines as Monty’s wife Cami. Presumably the second half of the season will reveal why ‘Landman’ went to the trouble of choosing an actress of Moore’s caliber for the role, but for now her casting remains a mystery.
This deficit also extends to Tommy’s professional sphere. (A bulldog of a lawyer assigned to investigate an accident on the scene has the aggression of Beth Dutton and is as one-note as Kelly Reilly’s “Yellowstone” antiheroine.) But for the purposes of the show it is most damaging to efforts to cultivate the Norris family as a center of gravity to complement Tommy’s work. “The Patch,” as most locals call the fields, is where “Landman” really wants to be — though given the ubiquity of Spanish-speaking workers there, it’s disappointing that the show doesn’t make any of them a true co-leader. or even subtitle much of their dialogue. The closest we get is Michael Peña’s Armando, a sexist bully who torments his colleague Cooper.
“Countryman” has glaring gaps, and some of the incoherence that characterizes a TV empire with many offshoots and a single author. But these weaknesses are continually offset by an evocative sense of place that hasn’t been matched by television since “Friday Night Lights” in this corner of the country. (The inspiration for the series, the city of Odessa, is an oft-mentioned location in “Countryman.”) Even if the plot doesn’t quite come together in the first half of the season, a well-constructed setting can go a long way. time.
The first two episodes of “Landman” are now streaming on Paramount+, with the remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays.
