The Good, The Bad, and The Silly That Is 'Landman'

Is Taylor Sheridan the conservative Aaron Sorkin?

Photo by WORKSITE Ltd. on Unsplash

The season finale of Paramount+’s Landman, created by Taylor Sheridan, will drop this weekend. I will watch it at some point, as I am now pot-committed to this show. It has a tremendous cast — Billy Bob Thornton, Ali Larter, Jon Hamm, Demi Moore, Colm Feore, Michael Peña, and a bunch of character actors that you’d recognize if you saw their faces. The pilot was fantastic. Landman’s premise is intriguing: Thornton plays a fixer named Tommy Norris who works for an independent oil company owned by Hamm’s character. Tommy’s job is to keep the wells running while wrangling with Mexican drug cartels, shoddy equipment, and a dysfunctional family.

The thing is, the show’s quality devolved pretty quickly from that pilot. For every great piece of dialogue drawled by Thornton there are lines that even the cast members know are bonkers. The show’s female characters are, well, not exactly three-dimensional. And in recent episodes I’ve begun to notice an annoying tic embedded in Sheridan’s screenwriting:

• A Landman character makes an inexplicable choice;

• Other Landman characters exposit the reasons why it’s inexplicable just in case any viewer could not figure that out;

• The show shrugs its shoulders and moves forward without providing any compelling emotional or logical rationale for the decision. It’s almost like, “yeah, we know this is bonkers, we’re saying it’s bonkers, give us the mulligan.”

Don’t get me wrong, characters making ill-fated decisions is an essential part of drama. But good narratives can show why those decisions are being made. And, in the end, I fear that Landman has not turned out to be one of those shows.

So why am I watching it? Why am I pot-committed? Because Taylor Sheridan fascinates me in the same way that Aaron Sorkin used to. In a lot of ways Sheridan is Aaron Sorkin’s conservative doppelganger.

I have been a fan of Taylor Sheridan’s screenwriting since watching Hell or High Water. For my money it’s the best Western made in this century — in part because it is also set in this century. Anyone who can write this scene has my attention:

Anyone who can write Hell or High Water’s closing scene has my sincere admiration — it’s one of my favorite movie endings ever. [Why didn’t you embed that clip too?—ed. Because it’s too easy a cheat to embed that scene for those who have not seen the entire film. Watch the entire film is what I’m saying here.]

Nor has Sheridan been a one-trick pony. His screenplays for Sicario and Wind River are also fantastic. He also directed the latter, which has a pretty spectacular shootout scene. More recently, he has branched out into television. As near as I can figure, Paramount+ consists primarily of the Star Trek franchise and the Taylor Sheridan Equinox, as The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh put it. Sheridan is the showrunner of the Yellowstone franchise as well as Tulsa King, Mayor of Kingstown, Lioness, and Landman.

Like Sorkin, Sheridan is prolific af. And like Sorkin, Sheridan can gift his characters some great lines. While for Sorkin it’s the fact-filled debating monologues of educated white-collar types, Sheridan gives his salt-of-the-earth working-class folk some laconic beauties. In Hell or High Water, for example, a cop asks a bank teller whether the robbers were black or white, she countered, “Their skins or their souls?”

Both Sorkin and Sheridan traffic in nostalgia to some degree. For Sorkin, it’s a yearning for the days when Republicans and Democrats occupied the vital center. For Sheridan, it’s about the days when some professions (cattle ranching, oil prospecting) were more highly valorized than they are today. At the end of Landman’s penultimate episode, Tommy looks out from his backyard and sees a coyote prowling nearby. A neighbor then shoots it with her shotgun, muttering about how it kills pets. As Tommy looks at the carcass, we the viewer are clearly supposed to identify with the predator as something that used to be feared and respected — or, at least, understand why Tommy identifies with the coyote.

Sorkin is a liberal who dreams about good conservatives; Sheridan is a conservative who identifies with the marginalized communities of the American West, particularly Native Americans. As Vulture’s Andrea Long Chu pointed out, for Sheridan it is the cowboys — or, in the case of Landman, the oil developers — who are being pushed aside: “Sheridan has effectively allotted a place for white resentment within a larger critique of settler colonialism: If the show’s white characters fear replacement, this is because they are closely identified with the very people they first replaced; they have co-opted the language of settlement to describe their own mistreatment.” Chu is writing about Yellowstone, but it apples with equal force to Landman.

A few years ago The Ringer’s Alison Herman suggested that Sheridan’s politics were unclear: “the typical Sheridan property has a…. an adjacency to hot-button political issues that never quite coalesces into a political stance, a calling card that may also be the key to the writer-director’s success.” With Landman, Sheridan’s political stance has come into a little more focus.¹ At one point his protagonist Tommy launches into a Sorkinesque rant about the futility of wind power that was not exactly fact-checked.²

And yet, even as the show has not developed in the way that I had hoped, I still can’t quit it. Thornton is amazing in it. Ali Larter, who plays Tommy’s ex-wife Angela, manages to surmount the limitations of Sheridan’s screenwriting and breathe a manic energy that masks sadness into her role; you can see why Tommy married Angela and why Angela divorced him. And I swear to God — I write these words as a New York Giants fan — Landman coaxed an affecting cameo from Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones:

Landman is not great, but it’s still a fun, soapy combination of Dallas and Friday Night Lights. I am okay with it being my guilty pleasure if it gets renewed.

1. So, apparently, has Sheridan’s increasing tendency to insert himself into his narratives.

2. It is 2025 funny that one of Landman’s commercial sponsors is, I kid you not, the American Petroleum Institute.