Landman, Paramount+ review - once upon a time in the West

Is there only one Taylor Sheridan? His output is so prolific you’d think there must be half a dozen of them. Although little acknowledged in the UK, over the last decade Sheridan has been amassing an extraordinary string of credits that has made him one of the most significant players in Hollywood.

He warmed up on the big screen, writing screenplays for Sicario, Hell or High Water and Wind River, which he described as his “modern American frontier” trilogy. It was a theme he would ring variations on through a string of hit TV series. Yellowstone and its spin-offs 1883 and 1923 have been giant hits on American TV, and creator/writer/director Sheridan has followed up with the Jeremy Renner vehicle Mayor of Kingstown, the droll Sylvester Stallone comedy-drama Tulsa King and the CIA undercover-ops adventures of Lioness.

Now he’s devised a new series about the Texas oil industry, Landman, with a starring role which fits Billy Bob Thornton like a favourite sweat-stained stetson. He plays the titular landsman Tommy Norris, who works for M-Tex Oil, which is owned by the perpetually harassed-looking tycoon Monty Miller (Jon Hamm, pictured below with Demi Moore as Cami Miller). Tommy is as tactful as a sawn-off shotgun and the concept of charm has never been explained to him, and his job is to negotiate with landowners to acquire leases and prepare land for oil-drilling.

This can be tricky. Episode One opens with Tommy bound to a chair with a bag tied over his head, being roughed up by employees of a Mexican drug cartel. Tommy refuses to panic (this is a man who cuts off his own fingertip when he doesn't have time to wait for a surgeon), and patiently spells out to his captors how even the cartels are no match for the gargantuan economic and political clout of the oil companies. They manage to reach a compromise.

It transpires that friction with the cartels is an occupational hazard for the oilmen, whose trucks frequently go missing, only to mysteriously return a few weeks later after being used to transport contraband. When a “borrowed” M-Tex executive jet is involved in a catastrophic accident while ferrying merchandise into Texas, it leaves the spectre of a ruinous “vicarious liability” lawsuit hanging over the company, with Tommy potentially the fall guy.

Attitudes to oil are obviously rather different in Texas than they are in Britain, where Ed Miliband is determined that nobody will see a drop of the black gold ever again, but Sheridan does nod to the environmental issues. The Gen-Z attorney who’s handling the exploding-jet case is a clean energy enthusiast, which prompts a long-winded lecture from Tommy about how resource-hungry supposedly “clean” energy really is, and how the danger is that oil will run out before a replacement has been found. Spoken like a true oil man.

But he has more immediate problems. For instance, one of M-Tex’s wells has suffered a catastrophic blow-out, with several employees incinerated in the blast. The sole survivor is Tommy’s son Cooper (Jacob Lofland), who’s trying to make a career in the oil business and is starting out as a rookie “roughneck” (as the junior man on the team, he’s known as “the worm”). However, the comrades of his Mexican co-workers bitterly resent the fact that he survived while their buddies didn’t, which has forced Cooper to defend himself by displaying hitherto unexpected wrestling skills. The fact that the young widow of one of the deceased seems to have taken a shine to him is not going to make Cooper’s life any easier.

Meanwhile, Tommy is trying to be a responsible father to his daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph), who’s suffering melodramatic teenage angst over her boyfriend. Tommy has divorced her mother, Angie (Ali Larter, pictured above right with Randolph), who looks like a supermodel and loves nothing more than showing off her spectacular figure whenever possible. When she pays Tommy a visit and they go for lunch at a country club in Fort Worth (it’s on Monty Miller’s tab), Angie sets herself up by the swimming pool with her daughter, and keeps ordering tequila sunrises until they both pass out. “It’s such a mystery to me why our marriage didn’t work out,” Tommy murmurs, but who knows, there may be life left in their relationship yet.

All of this is set against a backdrop of vast West Texas landscapes, with scrubby desert and lonesome, arrow-straight roads stretching away into the distance. It evidently feels like home to Sheridan, who grew up in Fort Worth and now lives on the giant Four Sixes ranch, which is miles from anywhere in central Texas. Ride 'em, cowboy.

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