Taylor Sheridan's 'Landman' Is an Audaciously Tone-Deaf Love Letter to Fossil Fuels

The only thing on television this season more preposterous than Doctor Odyssey — with its threesomes and quackers — is Taylor Sheridan’s latest on Paramount+, Landman. After all, what could be more bananas in 2024 than a show that unabashedly celebrates the fossil fuel industry? Landman is a love letter to oil, and Billy Bob Thornton is its perfect messenger.

Take, for instance, an exchange between Thornton’s character, Tommy Norris — essentially the fixer for an oil company — and Rebecca Falcone (Kayla Wallace), a lawyer who serves as a stand-in for environmentalists. Sheridan treats her with the same disdain he reserves for vegetarians (as portrayed by Piper Perabo in Yellowstone). When Rebecca expresses surprise that wind farms exist on oil fields, Tommy delivers one of many lectures on the virtues of oil and the hypocrisy of environmentalism. He explains that the windmills are massive, with concrete foundations covering a third of an acre and extending 12 feet deep, and that they’re owned by oil companies. These windmills, he adds, power the oil fields, which are entirely off-grid.

“They use clean energy to power the oil wells?” Rebecca asks.

“They use alternative energy,” Tommy snarks. “There’s nothing clean about this.”

“Please, Mr. Oil Man,” Rebecca quips. “Tell me how the wind is bad for the environment.”

“You have any idea how much diesel we had to burn to mix that much concrete? Or make that steel? Or haul this shit out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that fucking [windmill]? Or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don’t even get me started on solar panels and the lithium in your Tesla batteries.

And never mind the fact that if the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow, we don’t have the transmission lines to get the electric to the cities. It’d take 30 years if we started tomorrow. And unfortunately for your grandkids, we have a 120-year petroleum-based infrastructure. Our whole lives depend on it. And hell, it’s in everything. That road we came in on. The wheels in every car ever made, including yours. Tennis rackets, lipsticks, refrigerators, and antihistamines. Pretty much anything plastic. Your cell-phone case, artificial heart valves, any kind of clothing that’s not made with animal or plant fibers. Soap. Fucking hand lotion. Garbage bags. Fishing boats—you name it. In every fucking thing.

And you know what the kicker is? We’re gonna run out of it before we find its replacement … the thing that’s going to kill us all [is not the carbon emissions], it’s running out before we find an alternative. And believe me, if Exxon thought them fucking things [windmills] were the future, they’d be putting them all over the goddamn place. Getting oil is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. We don’t do it because we like it. We do it because we’ve run out of options.”

Oh, hell yes! Give it up for oil and petroleum-based products, y’all! Hoo-rah! I haven’t heard this much audacious bullshit since Aaron Eckhart’s character promoted Big Tobacco in Thank You for Smoking, which at least had the decency to be satire. Here, there’s not a shred of irony — it’s just a big, patriotic wet kiss to fossil fuels. It’s absolutely bonkers. I almost admire the tone-deaf zeal with which Sheridan peddles his message.

But in Thornton, Sheridan has found the perfect delivery device. A few months ago, Vince Vaughn starred in Bill Lawrence’s Apple TV+ series Bad Monkey. While the show had mixed reviews, no one disputed that Vaughn was perfectly cast in the best role he’d had in two decades. The same can be said for Billy Bob Thornton here as Tommy Norris, the weary, cynical middle manager who does all the work and gets none of the glory, only the blame when things go south.

And boy, do they go south. Spoilers: in the pilot episode, Sheridan pulls a classic Kyle Chandler (à la Mayor of Kingstown). Michael Peña appears just long enough to feature in the trailer before his character is killed off in an oil well explosion. The disaster nearly takes out Tommy’s son, Cooper (Jacob Lofland), who dropped out of college to follow in his dad’s footsteps.

Tommy’s daughter, meanwhile, is the archetypal sorority girl one might expect from the union of Tommy and his ex-wife Angela, played by Ali Larter. Angela is channeling every ounce of Larter’s Varsity Blues character — a middle-aged woman who has yet to find the limits of what her sexual appeal can secure, apart from the love of an honest man willing to give her his undivided attention.

Like most of Sheridan’s oeuvre, Landman is a bad show — but it’s great Dad TV, and it is wildly entertaining. The fact that Thornton can deliver monologues like the one above with a straight face while still managing his signature deadpan snark should earn him a lifetime’s worth of Emmys. It’s a soap opera drenched in moralizing, one exceptional performance, and a roster of top-notch character actors that only Sheridan (and his paychecks) could attract — and Jon Hamm and Demi Moore, too. I love it — not because it’s good, but because of the comedy inherent in Sheridan’s conviction that it is.