Landman and the Sheridan Factory at Paramount

Landman premiered on Paramount+ on 17 November 2024 and finished its first ten-episode season in mid-January 2025. Taylor Sheridan, who created the show with Christian Wallace as co-creator, is now responsible for five ongoing Paramount series (Yellowstone and its associated spinoffs, 1923, Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Lioness, Special Ops: Lioness, and now Landman), with two further productions announced. The creative output volume has no real precedent for a single showrunner in the prestige television era.

The show itself, which I watched weekly across the autumn and rewatched in a single week in March, is worth describing precisely, because the ways in which it is good are not the ways Sheridan’s output is typically understood to be good, and the ways in which it fails are instructive for where the whole Sheridan operation currently sits.

What the show is

Billy Bob Thornton plays Tommy Norris, a “landman” for a West Texas oil company, which in the vocabulary of the industry is the person who manages relationships with landowners whose property the company wants to drill on. The show is adapted, loosely, from a 2019 Texas Monthly podcast called Boomtown that Christian Wallace reported. Jon Hamm plays the company’s CEO. Demi Moore plays his wife. Ali Larter plays Tommy’s estranged wife. Jacob Lofland plays Tommy’s adult son Cooper, who is working on the rigs. Michelle Randolph plays Tommy’s teenage daughter Ainsley.

The episodes run long. The first episode is roughly eighty minutes. Most of the rest run around sixty. The format is structured around a specific tension. Tommy is the man in the middle between the oil company’s interests and the communities, cartels, and landowners the company works among. The plot of the season follows a legal and personal cascade triggered by a well-site explosion in the premiere.

What the show does well

I want to make the case for the show before I make the case against it, because the case for it is specific and the case against it has been made a thousand times about every Sheridan property.

Thornton, at this stage of his career, is working in a register of gravelly world-weariness that he has been refining since Sling Blade. What the show does with him, and what I think is the central good decision of the production, is let him use the register without over-italicising it. Thornton’s Tommy Norris is a man who has decided that cynicism is a form of honesty and that most of the people around him cannot be honest because they cannot afford to be. The show gives him long speeches, yes, which is a Sheridan signature, but it gives him more scenes in which he does not speak at all, in which he stands on a drilling pad at five in the morning with a coffee and watches the rig and calculates the day’s risk.

The supporting Texas cast, particularly Jacob Lofland as Cooper, is also strong. Lofland, who was in Mud and Justified, has a specific register of quiet menace that the show uses sparingly. Cooper’s arc on the rigs, which progresses from green hand to experienced hand across the season, is the most formally controlled plotline in the show. The rig work itself, which is shot in locations around West Texas with real equipment, has a texture that the show’s other Texas plotlines do not match.

There is a specific sequence in episode four, where Cooper and a co-worker named Boss (played by James Jordan) spend twelve minutes on screen doing nothing but the mechanical labour of repairing a stuck drill string, that is the best twelve minutes of television Sheridan has produced. It is procedural. It is slow. It is unnarrated. The work itself is the drama. This is the Sheridan show I would like to watch, and the one the machinery around him will not let him make.

What the show does badly

The Demi Moore and Jon Hamm subplot, which occupies substantial screen time in the latter half of the season, is an entirely different show. Hamm’s Monty Miller is nominally the head of the oil company. The scenes he shares with Moore are set almost entirely in domestic interiors, involve long conversations about marriage and illness and legacy, and are written in a tonal register that does not speak to the rig-site material. Moore is good. Hamm is good. The show that contains them is not the show that contains Thornton at the rig.

The Ainsley plotline, involving Tommy’s teenage daughter and her new boyfriend, has been widely criticised for reasons that are straightforward. The show’s writing of a seventeen-year-old Texas girl reads, consistently, as the writing of a middle-aged male producer imagining what a seventeen-year-old Texas girl might be like if she were constantly dressed and discussed as an object of specifically adult male concern. Randolph, as an actor, is doing what she can. The material is beneath the actor and beneath the show.

The cartel plotline, which threads through the middle of the season and is resolved in a specific act of violence that I will not spoil, is the plotline that shows the Sheridan bandwidth problem most clearly. Landman does not have enough interest in the cartel material to make it work dramatically, but it cannot be a Sheridan show without a cartel, because the Sheridan brand requires a certain kind of frontier violence. The plotline is vestigial. It is there because the format requires it, not because the show is making an argument about it.

The production model

Sheridan’s deal with Paramount, as reported by multiple trade outlets, guarantees him approximately 50 million dollars annually, plus production equity on his shows. He writes almost every episode of every show he produces. Landman’s ten episodes were, as the credits show, written either solo by Sheridan or co-written with Wallace. The volume is, on arithmetic, barely possible.

The cost of the volume is visible in the finished product. Landman, at the episode level, has the marks of a show whose writer is spread too thin. Scenes resolve too quickly. Supporting characters receive arcs that do not fully develop. The show’s best material, the rig work with Lofland, is exactly the material that requires the least writerly attention. The show’s weakest material, the Moore/Hamm domestic drama, is exactly the material that would have benefited from a room of writers working it over with time.

Paramount’s bet is that Sheridan’s output volume is a commercial hedge against the erosion of linear audiences. Sheridan shows reliably draw older audiences that other prestige properties do not. Yellowstone’s linear performance, before the Costner departure, was the most commercially consequential dramatic success of the last five years. Paramount has spent the period since trying to replicate it.

What the season leaves

Landman was renewed for a second season in January 2025. The show’s viewership figures, as reported by Paramount, were the strongest launch in the platform’s history. Whether those figures translate into durable audience or whether they represent the Sheridan-brand audience sampling and migrating back to the parent Yellowstone ecosystem remains to be seen.

The more interesting question is whether Sheridan himself, at this production volume, can continue to produce the specific kind of show that made Yellowstone work. The evidence of Landman is that the ceiling is coming into view. The show’s good material is recognisably Sheridan at something approaching his best. The show’s weak material is recognisably Sheridan phoning it in. The problem is that the good and the weak are arriving in the same episode, and the ratio is trending in the wrong direction.

The artistic logic is harder. Landman has, somewhere inside it, a better show about West Texas oil work that Sheridan could write if he were only writing one show. The machinery he has built around himself does not permit the concentration. That is the trade, and Landman is what the trade looks like.

Watch episode four. Watch the rig sequence. Let the rest of the show recede around it. The best Sheridan on Paramount right now is the Sheridan who is not trying to be everything.