Billy Bob Thornton Is Riveting In Taylor Sheridan’s Middling Oil Drama Landman

Looking back, it’s odd that Billy Bob Thornton first became famous for the Oscar-winning 1996 indie Sling Blade, a movie where his character mostly communicates in grunts. Thornton is one of the big and small screen’s all-time great talkers, adept at laying down a line of patter at once amusing and mesmerizing. It’s a skill he puts to great use as the star of writer-producer Taylor Sheridan’s new Paramount+ series Landman. As an oil-company fixer named Tommy Norris—the kind of can-do, dirty-handed field operative who greases palms and puts out fires—Thornton never misses an opportunity to riff. In a voice halfway between a grumpy growl and a relaxed twang—and in colorfully profane terms—Tommy tells everyone within earshot what he knows to be true, whether they like it or not.

All of this makes Tommy Norris part of a line of Sheridan protagonists who claim to see clearly our world’s inevitable ruin, yet are nevertheless determined to do whatever needs to be done to protect their piece of it. He has a lot in common with Dwight Manfredi in Tulsa King, Joe in Lioness, Mike McClusky in Mayor Of Kingstown and—the progenitor of them all—John Dutton III in Yellowstone.

The big difference? Tommy’s a better hang. He’s much, much funnier. That’s not to say Landman is a comedy. Co-created by Sheridan and Christian Wallace—and based on the Wallace-hosted podcast Boomtown, about the messiness of the oil game in Texas’s Permian Basin—Landman is very much of a piece with Sheridan’s other shows, mixing soap opera and crime drama with earthy observations about The State Of Things.

Thornton co-stars with Jon Hamm, who plays Monty Miller, the boss of M-Tex, Tommy’s employer. The two go back decades together in the oil business, having ridden out multiple booms and busts. (The pandemic recession of 2020 nearly wiped them out and turned their Midland, Texas homebase into a ghost town, we’re told.) Whenever Tommy isn’t lecturing somebody about the realities of oil, Monty steps in to make more or less the same points.

But they never do it in the same scene—at least not in the five Landman episodes that Paramount+ provided to critics. Hamm and Thornton interact only via telephone in the early going. The fifth episode ends with the promise of a face-to-face meeting; but before that, this show’s two main characters are siloed off in their own storylines. And actually, it’s a stretch to call Monty’s scattered scenes a “story.” Demi Moore plays his wife Cami, but she barely appears thus far, popping up only to remind her husband to take his heart pills. That’s the extent of the plot that directly involves the Millers up to this point: Monty has health issues.

To be fair, Monty is also managing—at a distance, via cell—the same crises that preoccupy Tommy. In Landman’s first episode, a drug cartel steals an M-Tex plane and lands it on a private road as part of their smuggling operation; and then a big truck comes barreling through, causing a fatal accident which also destroys millions of dollars’ worth of dope. The bloody mess spawns a federal investigation, a lawsuit, and cartel threats. M-Tex’s problems intensify with a well explosion, witnessed by Cooper Norris (Jacob Lofland), Tommy’s son, who is trying to follow in his father’s roughneck footsteps.

As for the women on this show, aside from the barely appearing Cami Miller, there are four main female characters, each of which falls more or less into one of Sheridan’s usual types. Ali Larter has the showiest role as Tommy’s ex-wife, Angela, a larger-than-life sensualist who left him for a billionaire during one of the busts but now wants back into his life. Michelle Randolph plays their teenage daughter, Ainsley, who shares her mom’s propensity for skimpy outfits and self-centered choices, failing repeatedly to read the room. Sheridan seems to love these kinds of broadly drawn female characters: forces of nature who drive the men in their lives crazy—and not always with desire.

Kayla Wallace comes in at the opposite end of the spectrum as Rebecca Savage, a young but ruthless attorney who hates the environmental damage and institutional chauvinism of the oil business and is just as vocal about her point of view as Tommy is about his—only with less of a sense of humor. Then there’s Ariana (Paulina Chávez), the widow of a Mexican-American roughneck, who bonds with Cooper and leans on him when her friends and family in the community aren’t around.

Anyone who’s watched more than a few episodes of Yellowstone will likely recognize pieces of that show’s Beth, Monica, Summer, Mia and Laramie: all those Taylor Sheridan women who tend to drop into slots labeled “steely” or “wild” or “bruised.” They'll probably also recognize Sheridan’s typical narrative pace in Landman, where nothing much happens for the better part of an hour until suddenly something shocking or violent (or both) occurs.

In fact, there are times when Landman barely feels like a television series and more like an op-ed peppered with the occasional explosion. That it’s also pretty easy to watch is a testament to Sheridan’s ability to grab an audience’s attention. His shows always begin with a strong hook and a lot of promise.

On that promising side: Landman is the most overtly Texas-bound show since Friday Night Lights. (That connection is reinforced by the Andrew Lockington score, which sounds a lot like Explosions In The Sky and W.G. Snuffy Walden.) Sherdian, who wrote each of the first five episodes and directed the first two, has long had an eye for the unique qualities of out-of-the-way American spaces, be they in Montana or Oklahoma or the fictionalized Rustbelt city in Mayor Of Kingstown. He finds a few of those funky locations here, like a coffee kiosk staffed by bikini-clad baristas, catering to all the oil-workers who are up before dawn, and the combination diner and bar that only has breakfast and dinner menus because “lunch” isn’t really a thing in the Permian oil patch.

Landman is also filled with fascinating details about the oil business, which attracts the kinds of people who are willing to (or have no choice but to) work around the clock, accept that any given day may feature a fatality, and pack up and leave when times get lean. Even Tommy, who has lived in the basin for decades, describes it as “not home” and conducts himself accordingly—including by sharing a rented house with other M-Tex employees.

But the main reason to watch Landman is Thornton. He brings genuine juice to speeches that shouldn’t be as entertaining as they are: pissy little diatribes about clean-energy zealots, sex workers, anti-smoking regulations, governmental red tape, rapacious bankers, and whatever else is under his skin at the moment. Tommy is exasperating, but he’s also easy to root for, because he drops wry quips constantly, he stands up for M-Tex’s employees, and he uses Big Oil’s indomitability as a pretext to push around hypocrites and sleazebags.

Even the first time we meet Tommy, Thornton’s performance is riveting. In Landman’s opening scene, he’s tied up in a cartel hideout and laying out the land-lease terms the drug-lords are going to have to accept, unless they want their territory to be flooded with Halliburton mercenaries and DEA agents. Thornton has a bag on his head at the time; but he still has that voice, weathered yet pleasantly lilting. Sometimes that’s enough. 

Landman premieres November 17 on Paramount+