'Landman' is the worst of 'Yellowstone,' without any of the good stuff: Review
There are good TV shows, there are bad TV shows, and then there is "Landman."
The new series from "Yellowstone" creator Taylor Sheridan (armed with the blank check Paramount seems to have written him) stars Billy Bob Thornton, Demi Moore and Jon Hamm and is set in the rough-and-tumble world of the Texas oil industry. It checks all the boxes on the Sheridan hitmaker list: Beloved male baby boomer movie star; cowboy hats; blind worship of capitalism and the wealthy; and just enough explosions and bloodshed to make it seem like it's an action show instead of a soap opera.
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It seems like a formula for another Paramount+/Sheridan win, like "Lioness" or "Lawman: Bass Reeves" or "Tulsa King" or the "Yellowstone" spinoffs "1883 and "1923." And indeed, I predict a wide swath of those series' fans will sample the series and find it just as palatable and delightful. But as I trudged through the dust-coated episodes of "Landman" (streaming Sundays, ★ out of four), something in me snapped.
Slapped together with little regard to a sensible framework or even characters whose names you can remember, "Landman" is Sheridan's laziest work, and his most obscene. The series would be bad enough if it were just dull and insipid, which it is, but it comes with an intensely off-putting bit of male gaze that makes the series read as soft-core porn for old men who want to leer at teenage girls without any repercussions. It verges on outright disgusting, set against a generic setting and plot beats copied from old "Yellowstone" scripts.
If you can follow the story with its lack of exposition, you'll discover it's about Tommy Norris (Thornton), a fixer for a Texas oil company who makes deals with drug cartels, works with police and informs families about the deaths of workers on his oil rigs. He works for billionaire Monty Miller (Hamm), whose life seems mostly to consist of talking on the phone to Tommy and making his waifish wife Cami (Moore) happy.
Norris' very difficult day-to-day is complicated by the antics of his son Cooper (Jacob Lofland), who dropped out of college to work on an oil crew, his promiscuous daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) and his walking cliché of an ex-wife, Angela (Ali Larter). Oh, and there's some awful lady lawyer (Kayla Wallace) in town to protect Monty's company from liability after an accident, and she dares to ask a man like Tommy to speak to her respectfully.
These characters seem like they were copied and pasted out of a "Screenwriting for Dummies" book. Angela is a bad mother who is oversexed and spoiled by her new husband. What a unique take on an ex-wife! Cooper is ungrateful and thinks he knows better than his wise father. I've never seen a son character like that before. The lawyer's name is Rebecca Savage, as extra help to signal the frigid female stereotype she's based on.
And then we get to Ainsley, whose presence in the series is what turns things indecent. There haven't been this many inappropriate shots of an actress playing an underaged girl since Michael Bay picked up a camera for his "Transformer" flicks. From her lewd and unrealistic dialogue (I can't fathom a single teenager who would tell her father that she allows her boyfriend to ejaculate on her body), to her willingness to strip and flaunt in front of old men, Ainsley is a figment of someone's imagination. And now I can't unsee the rapacious shots of her in the shower or using Crisco as tanning lotion while a bald old man ogles her.
It's not just that the series is gratuitously exploitative of this spoiled, pouting, male-fantasy-in-a-purple-bikini character − though it very much is − it's that it's a sexist, solipsistic mess on top of a dumb, boring story about cardboard cutout characters.
Whether you like Sheridan's particular style of overwrought Western, the writer-director-producer has a talent for melodrama, and this is a story that could have been so juicy and tasty if it had been taken in a different direction. Based on the podcast “Boomtown” from Imperative Entertainment and Texas Monthly, it captures an intensely relevant slice of modern life. Oil is kind of a big deal, if you have somehow missed all the politicians, billionaires and activist debates on the role of fossil fuels in our culture and economy.
The Texas setting and oil industry feel interchangeable with any southern U.S. backdrop and big business is a criminal waste of the source material. The show lacks specificity and suffers greatly for it. Even its structure is something you can find somewhere else: It so slavishly follows the story beats that worked for the writer and producer on "Yellowstone," you could just slap Thornton into Kevin Costner's cowboy boots and call it a day.
As much as Paramount may wish that its golden boy can come up with an infinite number of middle-America hits that will finally propel the struggling Paramount+ into the streaming stratosphere, it simply won't. We live in an era of endless sequels and remakes; originality is rare and valuable. Sheridan used to be such a distinctive individual. Now he's just copying himself.
So thanks, but I can just watch "Yellowstone" again.