This review contains spoilers for Season 2 of “Landman.” But honestly, it must be seen to be believed.
Episode 1 of the second season of “Landman” — ostensibly about Tommy Norris, a fixer for an oil company — kicks off with a minute-long rant against breakfast.
In Episode 4, a sand hauler plows into a pickup truck on company land. There are multiple fatalities. We basically never hear about it again.
In Episode 7, Tommy and his ex-wife-turned-fiancée Angela (Ali Larter, given acres of scenery to chew), have an unprintable shouting match about the appropriate uses of an omelet.
Also, unrelatedly, in Episode 7: His pop scolds him, “I can’t wait ’til your prostate is the size of a grapefruit,” and then urinates on a rattlesnake.
It’s ludicrous. There’s nothing like it on television. Each week, I drink it up with the relish of “There Will Be Blood’s” Daniel Plainview, prospecting with his straw.
The show began on more stable footing, following the forever-exasperated Tommy (Billy Bob Thornton) through dusty vistas. In the constellation of projects by Taylor Sheridan, our leading red state auteur, it landed somewhere between artisanal Sheridan (the critically-acclaimed screenwriter) and franchise Sheridan (the impresario of “Yellowstone” and its spin-offs, and a purveyor of $38 candles). Like much of his writing, “Landman” glamorizes gritty men (and some women!) doing gritty jobs: Whether they’re petroleum engineers risking life and limb or boardroom cowboys wrangling deal flow, the work is nasty and necessary, and therefore noble.
The first season was “Sicario” meets “The West Wing.” The drama revolved around two ruthless business interests — the fossil fuel companies and the drug cartels — vying for territorial control. The dialogue was like if Aaron Sorkin were Republican, full of florid lectures about, say, the evils of wind turbines. Toss in some emotive instrumentals and wide-eyed cheerleaders (Tommy’s daughter Ainsley, played by Michelle Randolph), a la “Friday Night Lights,” and it was a heady brew, quenching a thirst you didn’t know you had.
The second season promoted Tommy to company president. But that topline summary can’t capture how strange the viewing experience became. Usually, when someone describes a series as “chaotic,” they mean that it’s graphically sexual or violent; it’s sloppily plotted or narratively muddled; the incidents are outlandish, the plot twists unforeseeable. But all the “chaos” is usually contained within a stable narrative structure. “9-1-1” remains a procedural; “Industry” is still a soap.
What they don’t mean: This show unfolds before my eyes like an exquisite corpse. They don’t mean: Sheridan and his co-creator Christian Wallace, each week, seemed to summarily fire their entire writers room and bring in an all-new staff to come up with the next fifty minutes — like a tormented Texan Penelope, nightly unraveling her dopey tapestry.
This season, from episode to episode, “Landman” seemed to fundamentally change what it was about. Sometimes it was a financial thriller hinging on insurance policies and hidden debt. Sometimes it was a sensitive family drama in which Tommy, his dad (a wet-eyed Sam Elliott) and his son Cooper (Jacob Lofland) try to break the cycle of abuse. Sometimes it was a Hallmark Channel rom-com starring the company lawyer Rebecca (Kayla Wallace) and a scruffy Australian geologist. Surprisingly often, it was a passionate indictment of the way we warehouse the elderly.
You can’t conscionably call it “good.” And yet, in our cluttered streaming landscape, where the big-swing prestige dramas can feel as dutiful as their schedule-filling kin, it’s thrilling. Too often while watching TV, you’re distracted by storytelling decisions that seem forced by external circumstance: someone’s contract being up, an abrupt nonrenewal. There’s a kind of off-kilter integrity to a show that swerves so inexplicably, rarely signaling its turns.
Here we should discuss the show’s gender politics. In the world of “Landman,” the women are oversexed and underdressed, and the men are baffled and alarmed. For my money, the first season’s worst offenders were, in descending order: Angela, whose fits of horniness and rage are chalked up to her menstrual cycle; Ainsley, an aspiring football WAG; and Rebecca, an avatar of liberal feminism and the pursed-lip audience for monologues on the stupidity of solar panels. It’s totally outrageous and, I regret to report, highly entertaining.
The second season doubled down: Angela practically slithers on-screen. Ainsley gets confused by words like “bison,” “precipitate,” and “buccaneer.” The ninth episode becomes, somehow, even more cartoonish when she meets her freshman roommate, Paigyn (Bobbi Salvör Menuez): a nonbinary sports medicine major who owns a pet ferret, bans music and animal products from their dorm and demands undisturbed meditation time as part of their “safe space.” (Oh, did I not mention that this show is also, sometimes, a campus satire?)
But the finale, which airs Sunday, surprised me again. During cheerleading practice, Paigyn notices that Ainsley can’t keep up, and advises her on how to strengthen her ankles. Ainsley defends Paigyn from sideline bullies. “Hey!” she shouts. “You think that’s cool, insulting our teammate?” Ultimately, they decide that they can compromise on the proper care and keeping of domesticated weasels.
It’s a minor note, but a revealing one. If “Landman” has a thematic throughline (and I have doubts) it may be this: Shared enterprise — be it the Horned Frogs athletics program or working a pump well — dissolves differences of race, gender and creed. The blonde co-ed who doesn’t get pronouns befriends the militant vegan. The immigrant oil field crew adopts the scrawny White nepo baby, gruffly teaching their new co-worker the word “cerveza.”
Ain’t that just the American way?
God bless “Landman.” Somehow, it’s been picked up for a third season. To borrow a line from Tommy, praising Cooper’s knack for knowing where to drill: “If it’s dumb luck, let’s keep him dumb a little longer!”
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