Landman: Season 1

Never in the history of television has a title been so direct. So on the nose. So obvious. This series, Landman, is about a land man. A landman. A land-man. What is that, you ask? It’s a dude — and it’s presumably always a dude — who makes the deals and manages the land on and in which the oil industry does business. Negotiates the land deals and then manages the crews who help extract the black gold from the ground. It’s the land, man.

And let me tell you, as a person who had to travel to Texas for works fives of times, it’s its own world down there. Not the Midwest. Not really the West. It’s Texas. And then there’s the oil subculture inside of the Texas culture. More pointedly the cultures of Forth Worth and Midland. The latter a town that only exists to support the oil business and the thousands of people it takes to run it. Which masks me wonder why drug cartels would choose to also do their business in the relatively small space of Midland when there’s a whole stupid empty state in which they can do their drug running and murdering and whatnot. Why poke the  billionaires with their gobs of money, power and guns? Seems like a bad plan. One our landman, Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton), needs to negotiate. When he’s not managing industrial accidents and the constant danger of having a bunch of roughnecks, rednecks and ex-cons all mixing together under incredibly tense and dangerous conditions. In the baking heat of West Texas.

Beyond Tommy’s day-to-day making sure pumpjacks don’t explode, his crews don’t kill each other and hoping the Mexican drug lords don’t murder him, he has to juggle his ex-wife, promiscuous teenage daughter and his son who dropped out of college to work on one of the aforementioned maintenance crews. Oh, and lawsuits and a billionaire boss, Monty Miller (Jon Hamm), who used to be his business partner and best friend before his side of an investment went belly-up and he had to go to work for a living. My point is that Tommy is juggling a lot of shit and it’s all stressful. So we get to watch an entire season of television of Tommy getting into and out of his truck to put out fires. Sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. I wish I could say there was more to it, but that’s essentially it. Tommy shows up in his truck, yells at someone or defuses a situation, gets back into his truck, drives to another location, gets out of his truck, yells at some more people, maybe has a Michelob Ultra or three and then gets back in to drive somewhere else. It’s kind of bonkers. Luckily Billy is pretty damn good at looking tired, talking shit and driving. So, that’s cool.

Of course the woman who plays his seventeen-year-old daughter, Michelle Randolph, is actually twenty-seven. Yes, she’s very attractive, but it’s kind of ridiculous to think she’s a high-school teenager. Her eventual boyfriend, who is also supposed to be in high school, is, in fact, 30. It’s kind of funny that the daughter is supposed to be a spoiled, beautiful (but relatively sweet) dummy. She plays the part very well. Tommy’s ex-wife/future-wife, Angela, is played by Ali Larter. Who I somehow confused with Ali Landry, she of Dorito commercial fame. To be fair, they are both named Ali and are very attractive women of a similar age. Though they look nothing alike. Well, Ali Larter is terrific in her role as a much sharper version of her spoiled blonde daughter. Unfortunately the writers seem to have run out of things for her to do, so they introduce a mind-bogglingly confounding (and boring) storyline about her finding an old folks’ home that she can shake up by introducing Cards Against Humanity and bringing them to a strip club. It truly comes out of nowhere and is really terrible. The daughter’s narrative hits a similar dead end after the 57th time having her parade around in her skivvies in front of Tommy’s older male roommates, making them very uncomfortable. This is honestly a very male-heavy show and the women in it — especially Demi Moore as Hamm’s wife, who has absolutely nothing to do the entire series — can feel wooden and/or wasted in their roles.

Additionally there’s a subplot with Tommy’s son, Cooper (Jacob Lofland), that involves a romantic entanglement that feels like it was written by a person who has never met a women, nor ever been in a relationship with one. Every time we go into that whole thing, I felt like fast forwarding. It’s super slow and is pretty annoying. Honestly, I’d be fine with just driving around with Tommy. Billy Bob is funny. And, at times, the show can ratchet up the intensity and cause at least a little tension. Larter and Billy Bob and their love-hate relationship (but really love) can be pretty entertaining at times as well. And the comic relief of his two oil dude roomates (Colm Feore and James Jordan) take a little heat off all the driving around and dead bodies. The show looks good and the surroundings feel a bit alien, which is kind of cool. People are continually getting beat and taking damage of various degrees, which must have kept the makeup department busy. And the bodies do pile up pretty quickly for a show that purports to be somewhat realistic. I think, ultimately, if someone could create a supercut of Tommy’s life and skip some of the side adventures and edit out entire characters, we might have a tighter, more compelling series. I mean all we see of Jon Hamm for the vast majority of the show is him taking 30-second walking calls from Tommy, getting a little pissed, making a demand and hanging up. It feels like they had him for one day, had him read his 16 lines into a cell phone in different outfits and released him. We don’t even see Demi’s face up close until the final episodes. It’s real weird.

Look, I will tune into season two, if only to watch Billy Bob and his wig sweat it out in the Texas heat and insist that light beer isn’t really beer. But if I have to suffer through the melodrama of Cooper’s relationship or watch pretend teenagers have awkward dumb-hot-people sex a million times, I’m not sure I can hang for a whole ten-episode season. I imagine there will be lots of cartel action and more gruesome deaths from something heavy falling on someone or exploding oil wells. Maybe even some gratuitous nudity. One can only hope.