Curiously, not a superhero show. Or, if it is, worst superhero ever.
I'd not watched any of the Yellowstone stuff by Taylor Sheridan. By the time I heard it was watchable there were 23 seasons of it and a few spin-offs, and I couldn't be bothered to enter that particular multiverse.
But when I saw Billy Bob Thornton, John Hamm, Demi Moore and Robyn Lively would be on a show, I was curious. Then I saw it was about the energy industry and set in Texas, and my ears perked up. I have lived the vast majority of my life in Texas, and my father worked for companies that produced instrumentation and valves for oil rigs, derricks, etc.. Anyway - like a lot of folks who grew up around oil, I have a passing interest in the industry.
What's curious is that during my youth, Texas was considered pumped dry. There were oil fields, sure... but the fracking and all that came along later. By the time I was in high school in the early 90's, if you saw an oil jack going, it was always worthy of comment. and, yes, pump jacks could be anywhere and were.
Someone figured out the fields were *not* dry, and fracking eventually happened, especially out in West Texas. And when I travelled out that way for work, all of a sudden the hotels were full of guys off a hard shift, getting rest, uniformly polite but eyeing me with suspicion as I went by in my tie.
Oil wise, things are definitely cooking in Texas.
Landman is, basically, a soap opera that sure feels like a modern spin on the dramas we used to watch, like Dallas. There's a wide array of characters, oil is at the center of it, but only some are involved directly with the business. And because it's TV, it's the lives and loves of those working around oil (read: men) that drive the show, and the women who love them.
Events begin with what feels like a Breaking Bad situation as our hero, Tommy (Billy Bob Thornton) negotiates the use of land owned by a West Texas cartel. Here we get our first of what will become familiar - speeches about the way oil really works and the business around it. It's a libertarian fever dream of "don't mess with me, and I won't mess with you" that feels, frankly, probably based on something, given the Wild West nature of the Valley and West Texas.
With that done, we settle into what his job actually is, overseeing the works in a Midland, TX adjacent oil field, no matter whether that means laying roads, making sure pumps are producing, ensuring the roughnecks are overseen or that the drug dealers are dealt with. Meanwhile, his ex-wife, Angela (Ali Larter) has sent their daughter, Ainsley, to Billy Bob as she heads for Cabo. And, Cooper, their son, has dropped out of Texas Tech to work the fields.
In rapid succession, issues pop up like toad stools all at once (as issues often seem to do in real life). A plane delivering drugs is hit by a truck, killing people and dumping millions all over the road that isn't burned up. A pump jack explodes. And the daughter shows up, an apple that has not fallen too far from the tree. And, attorneys arrive to find folks to blame.
Whether it's worth anyone's time for me to follow each plot thread or not and discuss it is maybe something you can mention in the comments.
Overall, the show has a problem all of these shows have, in that they're intersplicing scenes, but characters often don't seem to carry what happened in one scene into the next. Tommy visits his son in the ER, but doesn't mention for a full episode to his daughter that (a) her brother is in town, dropped out of college and (b) that he's in the hospital. And when Tommy does remember, it seems like someone mentioned to Sheridan that there was an oversight, and he whipped up this scene to patch over the cracks.
In many ways, the show is not just old-fashioned in feel as a sort of hour-long soap. With a show where women seem to exist for the pleasure of the men-folk, it can feel like a throwback to 1980's-ness in attitudes and approaches familiar to TV of that bygone era.
The show has this weird, paternalistic thread that I can see some people thinking is just Billy Bob's Tommy being a cool dude. But it is very much a show about Tommy (Billy Bob's character) always being right, even if it sucks for everyone. There's lots of "let me tell you how it is" nonsense where he lays his views out, and people have to just nod, in quiet awe of how very right he is. This includes field hands, drug dealers, and anyone with time for a one page monologue.
If this is supposed to be one of Don Draper's cutting smack downs... Don did that like once or twice a season, not every half episode and not telling his wife "I don't have to give a shit that you tried your heart out to make me happy" like that is a good thing. We knew Don sucked as a person, but he was *our* asshole, and we were not expecting Don was going to make good decisions. Here, Tommy is wise and cunning, except that he's forgotten his 17 year old daughter should be in school.
But, yeah, you can definitely feel your difficult uncle watching this and nodding along, pretty sure he'd also come off as cool as Billy Bob. But... Seeing a show that is about the big, complicated picture of the energy industry, and candidly discussing - often in monologues that feel like a brief presentation - the realities of our dependence on oil versus what we're encouraged to do for Earth Day, is kind of surprising to see on TV.
This is an oil field, and, thus, the women are wives, girlfriends, waitresses and all dependent on men. This fact passes without comment, and the show does not (yet) try to give us a female roughneck - and I do not know if such a thing exists in that region. Even the high school aged daughter is planning on attending college not for an education, but to plan her life as the girlfriend of an college quarterback whom she will marry just before he goes to the NFL.
I don't know if this is Sheridan's SOP for female characters. The one woman with a degree and a job is a young shark of an attorney who seems like an Ally McBeal character shaken out of a character factory, and her arc is kind of ridiculous and confusing as she's just set to "fight everyone like a caged badger" all the time and with no provocation.
What I think people are howling about regarding the show is primarily that Ali Larter's character, the ex-wife Angela, plainly states her goals in life as a pampered housewife, she is occasionally mostly or all-naked, and could fit in on a Real Housewives show as the reckless one. In the show's greater context, gawking at women is par-for-the course, with gratuitous male-gazey scenes that serve almost no purpose. Further complicating the picture is a sub-plot surrounding the son, Cooper, and his relationship with a newly-minted widow that rings entirely false when it comes to grief, and reads like some White Knight fever dream.
I will pause and say, I don't know if it's inherently sexist to have these characters and *only* these female characters in the context of a show set where it is about what it's about. If you do a show about an NFL team, my guess is you're going to cast all men as the players and coaches and then slot women around that.* But it's also not hard to start losing faith this show will smarten up in this regard as Sheridan really leans into some weird choices that feel like TV pulp, and disassociated from reality... in some ways.
Part of me is pretty aware - this is planned as a multi-season TV show, and in this year of 2025, characters do not reset every episode and return to their original state. Like Dallas, comic books and soap operas, we're planning for characters to grow and change. Maybe Angela and Ainsley will remain shallow people focused on being pieces of meat for men - and a particular flavor of man at that. But (a) let's not pretend that there are not professional wives out there for rich people. Or (b) that those women are stupid or have no inner life. I'm not saying these characters are my favorite thing, but Betty Draper's storyline on Mad Men was one the great tragic storylines on TV, and people mostly chose to be mad she wasn't just a good, brainless housewife for Don.
And, maybe our young, angry female attorney will settle down after another dozen or so "let me tell you how it is, princess" speeches, that she stands around and listens to (maybe THIS is why she's so cross).
Who knows what Landman will do with the female characters who hitch their wagon to people in a business based entirely on speculation? The show has already talked about what happens to families when oil gets too high or too low, and I sure was aware of what was happening with oil as a kid when we were told "Christmas is gonna be light this year" and I watched housing markets crater. Further, we can see what Angela wants, and what she wants to give others - and neither is really appreciated. And if that's okay, we don't really know yet.
But the season finale sure seems like it's setting up next season for Ainsley to work her way through a pregnancy (she doesn't seem to actually go to high school, for being a high schooler, and never complains that she had to move schools sometime during football season during her Senior Year of high school).
I guess my question is - is it just offensive to people that people like this exist? Or they think they can't have stories about them on television? That they don't get slotted into "non-problematic" zones as characters? I'm not sure. In a landscape full of reality TV show stars and contestants who are not exactly models of modern feminist movements, do we really care, or is the outcry posturing?
Never forget, kids... the algorithm doesn't care if you hate watch. It cares that you watch.
Honestly, I think I'm more troubled by the whole storyline about Cooper and the widow that feels absolutely absurd and makes sure neither the dog or baby are ever in the room for any scene. Nor does the widow have to go to work or see her own family or friends. It's just weird and lazy.
I felt a bit robbed as I was delighted to see Michael Pena show up, and was looking forward to a storyline about Cooper getting to know this family of roughnecks, and come to get to know them. Then they all got blown up. There's a whole separate thread to discuss race in this show, and the unspoken rules of race in how TV works and how the world works... but I've probably gone on long enough.
So, what did I like?
Well, everyone on the show is good! I don't think anyone is bad or less than entertaining. I do find the basics of the oil fields interesting/ entertaining, and certainly the stuff with the cartels. There's a wide variety of characters. Demi Moore's hair is amazing. The soapiness is fun.
All that said - the show is what it is: a soap carried by enough talented actors to put some shine on it.
Sadly, Robyn Lively was barely in the show, and I kind of can't figure out why she was there at all, but it was lovely to see her.
*we can discuss how women were handled on Ted Lasso another day, and how they managed that in their context
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