‘Landman’ Drills, Baby!

Taylor Sheridan’s Landman drills into preconceived notions about the oil & gas industry, fracks-it with an unstable solution of true-to-life realness topped by a helping of Hollywood madcap, then leaves you hopelessly addicted to a ridiculous modern western. Give it a chance, if you’re a juicy television junkie, and you’ll want more.

I’m biased, though, having grown up in Midland. Spent a lot of time around the oil patch, around independent service and production companies. You just pick-up on things through osmosis, even when the words oil and pipe aren’t in your job description. That’s how it goes in a smallish energy-industry town. Everyone eventually works for “the industry,” whether they know it or not.

There’s no character in Landman who’s not busting britches for big boomtown money. In this way, Landman plays like an oil industry explainer. Sheridan crafts entire plotlines to surface an operational dynamic of the patch and explain how essential oil is to the world. That’s because Landman draws more than inspiration from co-creator Christian Wallace’s fantastic podcast, Boomtown. For Texas Monthy, Wallace captured West Texas’ tertiary relationship with its land, oil and culture better than most. It’s worth a listen.

What does it take to produce half of the nation’s oil and gas every year, Landman asks? A lot of work, some smarts, dreams and a plan. But, mostly work. Work is the theme of Landman.

The landman in Landman, Tommy Morris (Billy Bob Thornton), is the hardest-working worker working the workers, don’t ya’ know? He’s up against a whole-helluva lot. Drug cartels extorting upon his leases, roughneck crews infiltrated by gangs, several layers of unhelp government(s), big-city lawyers, pumpjack blowouts, rig accidents, OSHA violations galore, and a super-hot gold-digging wife and their even-hotter daughter.

This amalgamation of villainy tag-teams upon Tommy every episode, as he solves the problems the best he knows how, or not at all to his exasperation. In the shittiest of absurd circumstances, poetic pearls of westenly-wisdom effortlessly spout from his mouth like black-humoured gold.

It’s a lot, often comparably outlandish in scale to an episode of Walker Texas Ranger. Take for example, the first episode’s leading plotline. A violent cartel somehow “borrows” Tommy’s plane to run drugs, lands it illegally upon a remote oil patch service road to transfer a shipment, and then a competing oil company’s speeding oil tanker accidentally rams into it.

“When 11,000 gallons of crude oil hits 11-octane aviation gas, it tends to go boom,” explains Tommy. This never happened in Midland-Odessa, to my knowledge, but it works in Landman.

Billy Bob makes it work. I’d bet Sheridan wrote Tommy for Billy Bob. It’s perfect for him. You get grizzled notes of Goliath up against a dysfunctional and corrupt system, as much as you get Coach Gary Gaines in Friday Night Lights shining a dim beacon of light in a cynical blue-collar mining-city.

Tommy’s fairer counterpart, a gold-digging ex-wife Angela (Ali Larter), wants Tommy back around her little finger now that he’s drilling wells again. Larter looks every bit as 25 as she did when she played teens in sexy teen movies 25 years earlier. Her comic timing has improved. She’s dishing comedic-MILF energy, channeling Mary Louise Parker in Weeds, leveraging sex in the free-enterprise market of camp.  Delightful.

The sexual-tension comedy in Landman runs deep, like it should in any old western. Sheridan taps it like a 1,000-barrel a day well that’ll never run dry. The men run rough, and the women play trophy wife, exploiting their weaknesses. Morris, manager of the unmanageable, somehow even manages to manage his daughter’s womb and procreative choices. You may groan, till the seemingly misogynistic joke circles for a callback, and you cackle at the doubled-down parody of prudence in a post-metoo world.

The only force on Earth Tommy Morris cannot manage is his boss, billionaire oilman and financier Monty Miller (Jon Hamm). Calling the shots from Fort Worth and shrewdly micro-managing every well through his remote right hand landman, Monty may be a villain. He doesn’t care about the men, or the land, or the Earth.

In a meeting of energy-industry players in Fort Worth, talking about their diversification efforts into sustainable energy, Monty goes-off fully-unhinged. He doesn’t care about “career college students blocking London traffic or spraypaint a fuckin’ sculpture.”  All he cares about is that “the price of oil stays between 76 dollars and 88 dollars a barrel.”

That clip went viral in conservative social media, among people who’ve apparently never seen an oil exec talk before. They talk like this all the time, and it’s not as inspiring as it sounds. It’s, well, their business.

Monty’s bodacious wife Cami (Demi Moore)–oh wait, did I mention that Demi Moore is in this? She’s billed, though yet to be seen. I’m five episodes in, halfway through this breakneck 10-episode first season, and Cami is not a flat character. She’s non-existent. I suppose I’ll have to keep watching. Like any show in the Sheridan Westerverse, there’s more drama to drill.

With Landman, you drill into the unknown, never sure what you’re going to get. One minute you’re watching a sexy soap, then a campy western, then a working-class morality tale, then a grizzled western, then a legal thriller, then a tearjerker. Landman isn’t the high-minded art film of Sheridan’s critically-acclaimed Hell or High Water, but it’ll dare even the toughest critics to not be frackin’ entertained.