Landman: Season 2

I honestly can’t wrap my head around just how subversively terrible this show is. I mean the general misogyny is right there on the surface. I wait and wait for at least one of the characters to utter “woke mind virus,” but it never quite comes. But it all sits there lurking under the surface. Until it does. In honestly one of the worst scenes in recent TV history, our 28-year-old blonde actress (Michelle Randolph) playing a seventeen-year-old high school student battles a woke, non-binary snowflake who has been assigned to her as a roommate during her one-week cheerleader camp adventure at Texas Christian University. It’s like Sheridan just couldn’t hold his tongue anymore and decided he needed to chide everything “woke” in this one dour young person who he decided is everything America shouldn’t be. It’s an absurdly bad and sour note in a series that has almost aggressively spiraled into bad. Even when he tries to make up for it later and has the two characters [not] kiss and make up, it’s just too late in a series full of too lates.

There is not a woman in this series who Sheridan will not objectify. The aforementioned Randolph is constantly talking about all the sex she’s had and how she basically controls men and all situations with her [seventeen-year-old] sexuality. Ali Larter’s character bascially just cooks dinner, constantly flies off the handle (with lots of jokes about her being on her period) and always rewards her relationship with Billy Bob Thornton with some road head or threatening to withhold sex. Serious woman and lawyering badass, Rebecca Falcone (Kayla Wallace), just loses her head like a giggly, smitten schoolgirl over a guy with a mullet, a [fake] Australian accent and some nice shower gels, almost throwing her career away because he’s just tooooo hot. 120-pound soaking wet Jacob Lofland has to save his kickass, independent girlfriend, Ariana (Paulina Chávez), from being beaten and raped in the alley behind her work. And, dammit, he told her she shouldn’t take that job working at that bar in that crop top because it’s the man’s job to take care of his woman. See what you get?! Billy Bob hires a stripper to be his dad’s physical therapist because apparently he couldn’t just hire a normal physical therapist? Because his dad would be more apt to go with it if the woman was hot and walked around in her underwear? I mean… And, lastly (because these are literally all the women in this show) is Demi Moore’s Cami Miller. A woman who spent the entirety of the first season of this show in the swimming pool or occasionally handing Jon Hamm a drink poolside. Now she’s the shrewd businesswoman, who at one point kind of does this little speech about lions and gazelles (or something) that makes you think she’s going to be amazing. But, no, she turns out to also be a useless woman who has no idea what she’s doing and only serves to be a plot point to make Billy Bob’s character save the day. She is ultimately — like all the women in this series — reduced to a beautiful thing to look at, a distraction or what feels like a note from the people at Paramount to Sheridan that he needs to have at least a few women in this series. I will say, they are all incredibly nice to look at, so he succeeded there, and are, in the cases of both Larter and Randolph, very effective in what they’re asked to do, but it’s really evident that Sheridan has no time for the ladies except as objects or the occasional comic relief.

I think I leaned too much into the Billy Bob of it all in this show’s first season. I was entertained because his constant state of exhaustion with his various emergencies was funny. I ignored the weird politics of everything. The obvious product placements (everyone in Texas drinks Michelob Ultra, for instance) and the general disdain for plotting. But all of that came into sharp relief in the second season. There are plots that get completely abandoned. One being this accident in front of one the company’s wells where a dude was trying to kill himself that is played as a big thing and then just kind of vanishes. And another around a well leak that kills a bunch of people and blinds one of the dudes in the company that comes to nothing. And then other things that happened in the first season that are just glossed over. Remember how Billy Bob was nailed to a chair by the Mexican cartel and was about to be murdered before he was saved? By edict of the drug lord played by Andy Garcia? Who turns out in season two to be less of a drug lord and more of a finance guy, and not at all Mexican but Cuban. Well, all water under the bridge, as Billy Bob and his wife hang with Andy and his wife and go into business with him because… Yeah, I don’t know. Randolph’s daughter character does absolutely nothing this season other than walk around in really skimpy outfits to distract Billy Bob’s male housemates and voice the aforementioned clunky episode about how lame woke libs are. Even Larter has very little to do other than to make theme dinners that always devolve into her throwing shit at Billy Bob and screaming about something crazy. Or taking old people from the retirement home on drinking excursions. Oh, and the road head, of course.

In essence, nothing at all happens in this season of television. As if Sheridan gets one grand idea, writes one season and then kind of loses interest. He had one continuing idea for this season which kind of toddles along and everyone else just idles in neutral as Billy Bob drives from one place to the next in his truck. It’s as if they were told to save money and they just sat Billy Bob in the cab and shot scene after scene of him pretending to drive and cut it all together with him occasionally getting out at a different location. It’s weird. But the one narrative this season revolves around what’s going to happen to the oil company that Billy Bob works for and Cami now owns after her husband’s death at the end of last season. There’s something about a loan coming due or something on a rig out in the ocean that nobody knew about somehow… I don’t know. But that seems to be the only thing he can focus on, so every time we go to, for instance, to the Cooper / Ariana relationship, it’s so repetitive and boring, it’s as if Sheridan’s trying to get you to fast forward. Even a wise and slow-talking Sam Elliott as Billy Bob’s dad (even though the two actors are only eleven years apart in age) can’t make his little wisdom-laden quips make this feel like Sheridan put a lot of effort into its creation. I found the same issue with the other Sheridan series I watched, Lioness. He gets an idea, really digs in at first, but his focus seemingly wanes and he moves onto something else that has grabbed his interest. He does have a lot of stuff he’s juggling. And he reportedly does his writing alone in isolation. And, frankly, it kind of shows. I don’t purport to understand the whole TV writing process, and know that writers hate to take notes, but it does seem like consulting someone with a little bit of a sense of the modern world and how people actually act (especially women), might be a good thing for him going forward. But, hey, he’s the autor. I’m just a blogging hack.