Landman Review

Taylor Sheridan builds it out of a podcast about the Permian Basin, and the appeal is exactly the appeal of the podcast: the oil patch as a place with its own weather, its own arithmetic and its own casual body count. Billy Bob Thornton plays Tommy Norris, the fixer who negotiates with cartels, widows and regulators in the same afternoon, and he is the reason the show works at all. Critics landed around three quarters positive for the first season and a little higher for the second, with almost every notice crediting Thornton and almost every notice flagging the same problem.

Sheridan writes speeches. Characters stop the scene to explain energy policy, or masculinity, or what is wrong with the people watching, and the women were handed dialogue that reviewers spent a whole season calling embarrassing before the second softened it. Demi Moore, Jon Hamm, Andy Garcia and Sam Elliott arrive to give the boardroom half some weight, and the rig sequences are shot with real scale and real noise. The Satellite award for the ensemble is fair. The writing around that ensemble is not.