Landman is the latest Paramount Plus original series from Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan. The 10-episode drama takes place in the Permian Basin of west Texas, the highest-producing oil field in the United States, and features Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris. He’s a weather-beaten crisis executive for M-Tex Oil, whose high-pressured job involves leasing the land, managing the crewmen who work on it, and finding solutions to the many catastrophes that arise in such a dangerous environment.
Moments into the first episode its clear that Tommy (Thornton) has quite a set of cojones on him. Bound and blindfolded, two armed Mexican cartel members idly monitor him until Tommy's Texan twang breaks the silence. He needs to use the little boys’ room. His request falls on deaf ears until he asks en Español, which provokes first sniggers, then outrage as one of them clobbers him with his weapon. Yet Tommy remains composed. Even when a more senior criminal member enters, and, after a brief parlay with his colleague, casually shoots him right in front of Tommy.
Tommy’s there to negotiate the land lease with the cartel on behalf of M-Tex Oil, yet there’s fraught debate over who it belongs to. The cartel leader insists it’s their land, but Tommy doesn’t hesitate to contradict him. “You own the surface. Which you purchased from Daniel Piersal and Daniel Piersal’s father sold the rights in 1993 to the Permian Basin Trust.” Now, he relays with conviction, those rights belong to M-Tex.
The cartel member toys with killing Tommy and hanging his body from a bridge. But the crisis executive clearly feels pretty damn invincible. Try it, he says, and the FBI would retaliate by sending drones to Mexico alongside “thirty Tier 1 operators” (elite special ops forces) to take them out. Unintimidated, he provides them with an ultimatum. “Here’s the deal, and it’s the only deal: you don’t f**k with our product, and we don’t f**k with yours.”
They sign the lease and leave. Tommy unmasks himself and we get our first glimpse of our grizzled hero. Chain smoking and gulping back multiple beers, he explains the highly-stressful specifics of the job. First, secure the land. Then, the part that can get you killed. “Babysit the owners, babysit the crews. Then manage the police and the press when the babies refuse to be sat.” That’s a lot of people to keep happy, so no wonder he’s hitting the Michelob Ultras hard.
The first catastrophe
We jump ahead to six months later. An oil pump stands motionless against a blue sky and a snake slithers across an empty road. Descending on this tranquil vista is a small plane whose progress is matched by a van following along a dirt track road. They converge side by side, and their passengers speedily relay the plane’s cargo of cocaine and/or heroin. They’re abruptly interrupted when a huge oil tanker appears on the horizon. Unable to alter its course, the prone vehicles, along with the drug smugglers, all go up in the cacophonous blaze, before the van comes to a stop, its driver also dead. It's a jaw-dropping moment, and just maybe a blunt but powerful metaphor for the unstoppable engine of big oil.
Just another manic Monday
The sun rises over the Permian Basin and Tommy is facing the start of another exacting week. Looking rather sickly and injecting himself with a medley of medicines, he’s bracing himself for the Monday ahead. Except it’s not Monday. It just feels like it because, for those working in the basin, life follows a different rhythm – one of non-stop, twelve hour shifts for weeks on end.
Tommy lives in Midland-Odessa with two of his colleagues: petroleum engineer Dale (James Jordan, a slovenly looking-fella who sits eating beans from the can, and oil and gas attorney Nathan (Colm Feore). Nathan reminds Tommy not to be late to the courthouse to give his deposition at 11am. But just moments later his phone rings. The plane that he reported stolen weeks ago has been found, though it's now just a burnt-out shell.
He makes his apoligies and hurries down to the incident site. Sherriff Walt Joeberg (Mark Collie) approaches, informing him that it’s even worse than it looks. The surrounding area is littered with flame-grilled bodies and illegal substances. And to make matters worse, Tommy never reported that his plane was stolen to police when it disappeared six weeks ago. Heck, he countered, he informed the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), shouldn’t they inform the police? He presses Walt to lie in an official police report, who refuses, but instead agrees to note that he called it in to the FAA. Now it’s pedal to the metal for Tommy to do some damage control. A criminal investigation is likely pending, and a daily shipment of 4,200 barrels need to be re-routed from the crime scene.
Tommy attempts to contact his boss Monty Miller (Jon Hamm), just as his phone emits an ominous ringtone and the image of his ex-wife Angela (Ali Larter) flashes up. She’s checking that he hasn’t forgot it’s his weekend to take care of Ainsley, their wilful seventeen-year-old daughter. But it’s Monday, right? Wrong! She and her boyfriend are jetting off to Cabo, so he arranges for Ainsley to hop on the next flight down. Angela clearly still has feelings for Tommy, which manifest themselves in lots of aggressive flirting down the phone.
We then cut to a glittering metropolis. Monty hobnobs with other doyens of the oil and gas industry – chiding them for not snatching up land when Covid hit – before excusing himself to take an incoming call from Tommy. His most trusted advisor, Monty regularly defers to his decision making. Tommy warns that M-Tex Oil is about to get flack on three fronts: from the insurance company, the victims’ families, and TTP (the company whose truck went boom). He provides the name of a litigator and Monty stresses the need to prevent the incident from going public. Tommy’s reply? “An airplane full of drugs being run over by an oil tanker ain’t news, that’s just another Monday.” To which Monty reminds him, dude, it ain’t Monday!
Texas rules, Dakota drools!
As well as managing the land for M-Tex Oil, Tommy has plenty of family drama to keep him on his toes. There was a giddy reunion between him and his daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) as she arrived at Aero Midland for the weekend. But she brought her strapping, football-playing boyfriend Dakota Loving (Drake Rodger) along – and he clearly had just one thing on his mind, as Tommy realized when he clocked his wandering hands all over his daughter in the rear-view mirror.
Pulling in to watch a football match before going home, Ainsley opened up to her father while Dakota got the reception of a minor celebrity. She’d die if she didn't get in to Alabama University, she told him, which was where Dakota would soon be headed. Tommy enquired if they’re having sex. Yes, but they have a rule. And he instantly regretted asking what that was. Dazed, he took a quick call from crewman Luis (Emilio Rivera), who updated him about his son Cooper’s first day working the patch (“He’s green, but he tries.”)
Back at the house that evening, Tommy announced he was turning in for the night as Ainsley and Dakota canoodled right in front of him. But he wasn't leaving Ainsley alone with Dakota. He told her she’d share his room, while the football-playing stud got the “Junior Suite,” i.e. the couch. Ainsley hoped Dakota was “the one,” but Tommy’s experience told him otherwise. Admitting that they'd had sex, but never simply slept together, he relented and let her join him on the couch – though wondering out loud exactly when he’d had his cojones lopped off. She soon returned anyway, devastated, after Dakota remained hung-up on physical rather than emotional intimacy, saying “I guess he’s not the last one” before curling up tearfully in her father’s arms.
Another Norris in the oil patch
The sun hadn’t even come up when Cooper (Jacob Lofland), Tommy’s son, began his first day as a roughneck for M-Tex Oil. Joining the daily migration of workers to the patch, he was beckoned over by Luis and Armando (Michael Peña). “Baby Norris?” They knew his father and offered to give Copper a ride. He hopped in beside Elvio (Alejandro Akara) and sat silently as Spanish music played on the radio. It was all heavy-lidded gloom until they pulled up at “Babes N Brew”, a coffee shop where the servers wore pink bikinis. Cooper made the rookie error of ordering a latte rather than a fuss-free black coffee. This provoked the righteous indignation of his fellow passengers, with Armando shouting “the white kid ordered a latte!” by way of explanation to the growing queue of drive thru customers.
Brothers Armando and Elvio, and their uncle Luis, took Cooper under their wing – which meant making his first day a living hell. Egged on to climb a vertiginous tower for a “Tucker valve” that didn't exist, a harnessed Cooper lost his footing, slipped, and plunged about forty feet before getting a grip on the ladder. Now in a state of shock, Elvio sped up the ladder to coax him down.
After a tough day on the patch, he’d earned the respect of Luis and his family – though he wasn’t exactly roughneck material. They invited him into their home, where they laughed at this Caucasian’s aversion to spicy food, and encouraged him to start learning Spanish (“Estoy comiendo un taco ileno de verga”). But after all this bonding, it wasn’t surprising when things went spectacularly south.
The second catastrophe
The following day, Elvio, Armando, Cooper, and Luis arrived to repair an oil well. They didn’t have the best wrench for the job, and the pipes and valves were all rusted up. They instructed Cooper to fetch a 24-inch pipe wrench. He was still a novice, so took his sweet time in finding it. Luis persisted nonetheless, rhythmically hammering away with his insufficient equipment, though not aware of the quiet hiss of gas. Cooper finally put his hand to the wrench and turned to run back. But then Luis struck one decisive hammer blow and BOOM – the whole area erupted in flames. Cooper was propelled back by the force of the blast and the entire rig became a raging inferno. An endless column of fire belched from the ground, and Elvio, Armando, and Luis were nowhere to be seen. As the camera lingered over the devastation, there was little doubt that no one survived the blast except for Cooper.
Watch new episodes of Landman weekly on Paramount Plus, every Sunday in the US and Canada, or on Mondays in the UK and Australia.
