Taylor Sheridan's Well Runs Dry in "Landman"

For those unfamiliar, a landman is the public-facing side of an oil company's production team; their job is to secure leases and mineral rights for oil drilling. As Taylor Sheridan's umpteenth show for Paramount Plus would have you believe, it's a cutthroat job that involves, of all things, negotiating a land deal with a Mexican drug gang while tied to a chair with a bag over their head. If that sounds a little ridiculous, that's because it is, but Sheridan's new show "Landman"—which reads as "Yellowstone" for North Texas—stumbles out of an already-tapped well with few new or interesting ideas to plumb.

Based loosely on the serial documentary podcast "Boomtown," "Landman" positions West Texas as a new frontier for avarice—roughnecks flock there to build new drills and oil derricks, and executives scramble for ownership of what black gold remains out on the plains. Oil, the show purports, is the lifeblood of the American lifestyle, a devil's bargain that even savvy landmen can't talk their way out of. "If the whole world went electric tomorrow, it would take thirty years" to stop being dependent on oil, Tommy tells a bleeding-heart regulatory lawyer (Kayla Wallace) sent to evaluate his operation.

Channeling a corn-fed version of his character from Prime Video's "Goliath," Billy Bob Thornton steps into the cowboy boots and straw hat of Tommy Norris, a no-nonsense landman who spends his days putting out fires (both literal and metaphorical) for a big oil company run by Jon Hamm's golf-playing tycoon Monty Miller. Like the oil he secures, Tommy is crude to a fault; he's brusque, surly, and full of the kind of tell-it-like-it-is conservatism that sounds like honey coming out of Thornton's mouth but turns to dust when it hits the brain. "Don't pretend that I offend you," he tells one farmer in the first episode after making one of many off-color remarks.

"Landman" runs at the pace of an oil derrick, lumbering slowly from one branching plot thread to the next. When we're not focused on Tommy or Monty, we'll float over to Tommy's son, Copper (Jacob Lofland), who's chosen to take a grunt-level job with the roughnecks who build the rigs. Cue jokes about his Mexican teammates razzing him about ordering a latte from the local Dunkin, but that's mostly all it's good for, apart from filling time with the fallout from an oil rig explosion that feels manufactured to shock the audience with surprise deaths.

Bafflingly, "Landman" also wants to be an interpersonal family drama—think "Dallas (Taylor's Version)"—which is where Sheridan's most noxious conservative streak comes out. When Tommy's not wheeling and dealing, he's fretting about his oversexed, nymphomaniac ex, Angela (played with MILF-y broadness by Ali Larter, who's at least having fun), and his shallow teenage daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph). The former is bored of her wealthy new husband and wants to come crawling back to her first love; meanwhile, the latter is positioned as a spoiled, do-nothing brat who takes after her mother's sex-forward methods of persuasion. ("We have a rule," Ainsley innocently tells her father of her football-player husband. "As long as he doesn't cum in me, he can come anywhere on me.")

The characters are such broad types, and so often used for punchlines or the subject of one of Thornton's baleful head shakes, that one can't help but wonder whether the show just hates sex-positive women. Between that and its swaggering bromides about lattes, twerking, and environmentalism, "Landman" truly feels like a bone thrown to the recliner-chair dad who doesn't like how things are changing these days.

The drama is limp, and the out-of-nowhere jokes make it even worse; it's wild to have a tender family scene get interrupted by deadpan sitcom jokes or crash-zoom farces about people wandering into the wrong shower. What's more, the stakes are so subterranean you practically have to frack for them, which makes each 50-minute episode run by at a snail's pace. Thornton's sleepy truth-teller pulls many of his scenes together with his magnetic drawl, but the rest of the cast feels on autopilot. Sheridan, it seems, is tapped out, and there isn't much ink left to mine from his pen. Best move on to the next well.

Five episodes screened for review. Series streams on Paramount Plus.