Just when Yellowstone thirsts have finally been quenched, Paramount+ has another tale to tangle out the existential issues of life in the you ess of ay.

With Landman, Taylor Sheridan takes what Yellowstone did for ranching in Montana and turns it to the world of oil extraction in West Texas.

 

 

If you needed any further evidence of how successful Yellowstone and its overlord Sheridan have become, the call sheet for Landman is a decent indication. It’s a murderer’s row of greats: Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Hamm, Demi Moore, Andy Garcia and Michael Peña.

Thornton stars as the foreman of sorts Tommy Norris, presiding over a mammoth square of land atop rich oil reserves (‘The Patch’) and acting as crisis management between Hamm’s bullish billionaire owner and the boots-on-the-ground men risking their lives to make his millions.

 

 

Landman has all the ingredients that have made Yellowstone the biggest show in the US. There’s the folksy frontier setting. Then there’s the quintessentially ambitious and rugged Western man, played by Thornton with his southern twang.

That drawl is how we first meet him: with a bag over his head, explaining to his cartel captors why their land is about to be pumped dry for the next 50 years. The voice is unmistakable, as is the grit and assurance behind it. He’s bound and bagged-up, but still telling them how it’s going to go, and that they are going to do what he says. And they do.

 

 

When he makes it out of the warehouse and into the stark light of a Texan day, he replenishes his system with a strict diet of back-to-back beers and cigs. “This f**king job,” he tells us.

Like the great and now (spoiler) late John Dutton, Tommy is a man beset from all sides. The gruelling nature of the job makes him a lone figure, isolated from true connection with his family and children. He’s driven by a keen sense of only just barely keeping on top of everything, but still faces it off with bravado. Sound familiar?

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the soft conservative politics of the Sheridan-verse, there’s little said about the climate implications of all this oil drilling. The focus is more on how exactly they get to it. Anyone familiar with the news or the movie Deepwater Horizon will know this business is a dangerous one. In the first episode, there’s a blowout at a rig that proves fatal.

In this masculine ideal setting, Landman is populated with women in a man’s world. Like Yellowstone’s Beth Dutton, the show has a fantasy of the empowered, kick-ass woman with Demi Moore and Ali Larter’s powerhouse wives. But they’re always operating in service of the men around them.

Moore is wholly wasted as the dutiful wife, stuck in scenes where the camera leaves her in favour of Hamm gabbing on the phone, while Larter’s Angela follows Beth down the path to becoming an over-sexed, grizzled hellcat.

The most egregious entry is Tommy’s teenage daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph), whose scenes play out like a lo-fi Electra Complex nightmare. Inexplicably, she is almost always barely dressed, prancing around in front of her dad and his geezer mates with creepy lingering shots over her rear end. Is this something a teenager would really do? Or what a certain man would like to think a teenager would do?

The show is willing to embroil itself in questions of acquiring land, power and wealth, and with this comes the question of class. The oil business is divided into the working-class labourers and the white-collar suits, with Tommy in the middle.

The so-called roughnecks on The Patch are a slate of Latino characters, who are tasked with schooling Tommy’s green son on his first day. First up: you take your coffee black, because milk or any resemblance of softening to the harsh pure bean is a sign of weak fibre.

Yellowstone has been praised for its representation, with a population of Native American characters. But if these shows are fantasies of the white man’s plight in the face of perpetual social change, the diversity on screen is only ever endorsed if the characters cohere with what our main white protagonist wants.

Armando (Michael Peña) explains how mistaken he was thinking he could acquire wealth through anything but working The Patch. That’s the only way up and out for them; punishing and perilous work at the behest of the white billionaire.

All of this will be by-the-by for those who have already drunk down the Taylor Juice and gone back to the trough for more. Landman brings another strongman plagued by modern anxieties who you want to root for, perhaps in spite of yourself were it not for Thornton’s quick wit and no-toss-given attitude.

Despite or even because of its apparent faults, it has all the makings of a hit as big as Yellowstone.