Season 2 of Landman is over, and where to begin? Obviously, and most crucially, the land has been manned. Of this we can feel assured. But what else?
Before Landman—the Billy Bob Thornton–starring oil-and-gas melodrama from juggernaut red-state laureate Taylor Sheridan—premiered in 2024, I was a different person. My grasp of the nuances of the petroleum industry was paltry. Oil came out of the ground in places like Kuwait, and Venezuela, Alaska, and of course Texas, and then got tankered around the world in vast seafaring vessels, enabling the day-to-day grind of the modern industrial economy. No one ever admitted that wars were fought strictly over oil—the closest anyone came to this was George H.W. Bush during the first Gulf War in 1991—but wars certainly seemed to happen frequently in places where oil was in heavy supply. There was also natural gas and fracking and wind farms and this was part of the big picture too, but I wasn't too sure how it all fit together. Landman changed all that. I'm pretty sure I could run Exxon at this point.
Has there ever been a more didactic show in the history of television? In the third episode of the first season, Tommy Norris, the titular “Landman” played by Billy Bob Thornton, lays it all out. A white-shoe attorney, Rebecca Falcone (Kayla Wallace), has recently been hired to help the company that Tommy basically does everything for, M-Tex Oil, with pending litigation. She is from somewhere other than Texas, which makes her, by the show's logic, definitionally something of a snowflake. (She is at one point seen wearing a Northwestern hat.) She has concerns about the energy industry—like, is it wrecking the environment? Wrong question.
Tommy, beyond indignant, responds in the following fashion:
"If the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow … we don't have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities. It'd take 30 years if we started tomorrow. And unfortunately for your grandkids, we have a 120-year petroleum-based infrastructure. Our whole lives depend on it. And hell, it's in everything—that road we came in on, the wheels on every car ever made, including yours. It's in tennis rackets and lipstick, and refrigerators and antihistamines and pretty much anything, your cellphone case, artificial heart valves, any kind of clothing that isn't made of animal or plant fibers, soap, fucking hand lotion, garbage bags, fishing boats, you name it. Every fucking thing."
It’s an extraordinary monologue—one part David Mamet, one part David Simon, and one part press release from Halliburton. Tennis rackets? Garbage bags? Fishing boats? Fucking hand lotion? Jesus. I, for one, required no further persuasion. If dredging the depths of the earth is the only thing keeping me well-moisturized, then drill baby, drill. But that's just scratching the surface rights of what I’ve learned. Now that the sun has set on the second season of Landman, let me tell you some other things.
What does a landman do?
Let’s stipulate for the purposes of our inquiry that all landmen do some version of what Tommy Norris, the landman in Landman, does. He is the VP of operations for the independent energy concern M-Tex Oil. He explains this at the beginning of the pilot episode:
“You gotta get the lease. You gotta secure the rights and lock up the surface. Then babysit the owners, babysit the crews, then manage the police and the press, when the babies refuse to be sat. That’s my job. Secure the lease and then manage the people. First part’s pretty simple. It’s the second part that can get you killed.”
Now, there is some cognitive dissonance here, because this speech is delivered directly after he nearly gets killed doing the first part—securing the lease. Killed how? Well, somewhere in some barren West Texas structure, a drug cartel has taken him hostage and put a bag over his head. They keep punching him, and then one of the cartel’s higher-ups shows up and immediately shoots one of the hostage-takers for no apparent reason, and then asks why they should cede the rights to some part of some oil field that the cartel has apparently some claim over. And then Tommy, with the bag over his head, esoterically explains the long history of the mineral rights of the area, which M-Tex Oil actually owns, and finally the cartel leader is like: fine. He signs some paperwork and lets Tommy go, at which point Tommy smokes three cigarettes and drinks two Michelob Ultras in his pickup truck before getting on his way. That’s the simple part of being a landman, according to Tommy. It seems more difficult than managing the press to me, but I’m not a landman. Another thing Landman has taught me is that I will never be a landman.
So, this is dangerous work?
And how. And not just Tommy’s job, either. Everything involved with the energy sector seems pretty goddamn treacherous. In the first episode alone, a stolen aircraft filled with drugs is trucked over by a giant 16-wheel rig in a tragic misunderstanding of what roads are used for. It’s a spectacular set piece, with many deaths. Tommy will have to manage the cleanup. Later, Tommy’s young son Cooper (Jacob Lofland), a recent Texas Tech student and aspiring landman, narrowly avoids his own demise when an oil derrick he is working on explodes and kills the rest of his crew on what I think is his second day of work. That’s a mess, too. Meanwhile, the president of M-Tex Oil, Tommy’s boss Monty (played by Jon Hamm), has a heart condition which has left him at death’s door. Monty is very wealthy, and the strong suggestion is that if he were willing to walk away from the pressures of the energy industry, he might not die of a heart attack. Everyone tells him this: Tommy, his doctors, Jerry Jones (yes, that one). But Monty is not having it. He is too seduced by the rollicking thrills of the ultimate big-stakes casino game, which is, we are made to understand, hunting for oil and gas. Damn it, Monty. Couldn’t you just play the ponies?
So that’s the whole gig? Just explosions and heart attacks?
Far from it. Man can’t live on land alone, and that’s where the landwomen come in. And boy howdy, are they something else. If you’re going to start, and we obviously are, you’d have to start with Angela Norris, Tommy’s ex-wife played by Ali Larter as a kind of equivalent force of nature to the wind and dirt and oil and gas that otherwise drives Tommy. Angela is immensely entertaining and, by and large, very likeable—so take that into account when I tell you she is bonkers. She is forever FaceTiming—always FaceTiming, never a regular phone call—Tommy while he is landmanning, which takes hours and hours a day by pickup, and trying to seduce him in some way. She is very sexy and he is vulnerable to this, though he is always saying “Honey, I’m driving 85 miles an hour, and I don’t want to crash. Why are you taking your top off?” or something. She then usually informs him that she was put on Earth to beguile men into dangerous gambits, and he agrees, and eventually they decide to remarry even though at first she had already been remarried to some nouveau-riche douchebag named Victor. This is a bit confusing, but Tommy lives in a house near the Permian Basin paid for by M-Tex with the company’s lawyer Nate (Colm Feore) and engineer Dale (James Jordan), because that’s part of being a landman. When Tommy and Angela eventually reunite, she moves in, and, well let’s just say the whole lifestyle changes at that point.
The Permian Basin?
Right. This is a region in West Texas and New Mexico that includes the highest producing oil fields in America. For obvious reasons, much of Landman takes place here. You are possibly wondering, isn’t this a four-trillion-dollar industry? Why does most of the high brass of M-Tex Oil have to live together in one five-bedroom rambler stacked up like the Monkees? Don’t know. I’ve not been able to parse that one. But in sweeps Angela, with her homey Southwestern touches (lean into it) and her theme dinners. Angela’s dinners are a kind of running gag on Landman. Tommy comes home from work, he’s exhausted, he just wants something normal to eat and a Michelob Ultra or two. But no. Angela has done something like spend $2,000 on white truffles, and even though nobody knows what they are, they are a delicacy and she is proud to serve them until Tommy ruins things with his incessant bitching and Angela unleashes hell and starts throwing plates and pulling the tablecloth off the table. Everybody ducks and covers and starts running for the hills except Tommy, who placidly waits her out, and then usually apologizes and then they make out. If I did one-tenth of the things Angela does as a matter of practice every single day, I would have been institutionalized years ago.
Like, for example, at some point Angela and her and Tommy’s 17-year-old daughter, Ainsley (Michelle Randolph), just decide to start showing up at a random retirement community and getting the residents smashed on tequila. No, you read that right. Ainsley is a whole other thing. She is sweet-natured and pretty in an aggressively Dallas-Cowboys-cheerleader way. In fact, she is a cheerleader, and has gotten into TCU on a scholarship—although, and I am just calling balls and strikes here, she seems to be as dumb as a bag of hammers. She likes boys, and boys like Ainsley, and that figures, although Landman features some father-daughter conversations around her love life that are of such teeth-clenching discomfort, I wish I could strike them from my brain the same way Monty is always striking oil. But anyway, yes, Angela and Ainsley have no connection whatsoever to this retirement community, but they feel bad for the oldsters, so they start barnstorming the place on the regular, plying them with liquor and taking them to strip clubs and casinos. At first the staff at the retirement community is like, “This is completely illegal, and who are you again?” But Angela is not the sort to be dissuaded, and eventually the staff just gives up and lets her do whatever she wants. And yes, eventually some kind of irritating regulators show up and are like, “Why is this a frat house now?” and this gets contentious, and one of them gets kicked in the nuts, and he presses charges, but to no avail because Tommy knows the sheriff. Angela and Ainsley are immediately released and their antics are allowed to proceed unabated. This is a pretty strange subplot overall. Anyway, Angela has a philosophy, or at least a slogan, she likes to repeat: “Take life by the balls, and twist.” And twist she does.
Wait, isn’t this a show about drilling for oil and gas?
Yes, but try to understand the broader mosaic here. Don’t get too fixated, like Monty. Tommy is a man of the land, and well, “land” can pretty much entail any and everything.
After Cooper’s erstwhile crew is killed in the explosion, there is resentment. Cooper is hospitalized, but the rest of them all die, and they are all Hispanic and Cooper is not. He’s also kind of a nepo baby and probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and while he isn’t responsible for the accident, he wasn’t that helpful either. And other workers at “The Patch”—which is what they call the oil fields—well, they’re pissed. He’s a good kid really, and can hold his own one-on-one in a fistfight, but a few of the workers in the man camp gang up and kick the shit out of him. No one can beat those odds. So, Tommy rounds up some of his most loyal roughnecks, and they kick the shit out of the guys who kicked the shit out of Cooper, and the point is clear enough: You don’t mess around with Tommy’s family.
If I was Cooper, I would like a fresh start, but this is not the direction he goes. Instead, Cooper starts to date the beautiful young widow of Elvio, one of the men exploded in the accident. Her name is Ariana (Paulina Chávez), and she is kind but tempestuous and has a new infant and no husband, and man, does this feel ill-starred, but sure enough they pursue it. That same uptight lawyer from M-Tex tries to strongarm Ariana into taking a lowball settlement for the death of her husband, but no, says Cooper, who is not a lawyer but can read for comprehension and insists Ariana hold out for more money, which she does, eventually to the tune of a million dollars. This strengthens their bond and really chaps the attorney, Rebecca, who is beautiful but driven to the extent that she never relaxes. (When will Rebecca learn to relax?) And then Cooper starts wildcatting.
Wildcatting? What is that?
If there is one thing you need to understand when watching Landman, it is the difference between wildcatting and … not wildcatting. Not wildcatting is when you go through a thorough, multi-year process of vetting land for the possible presence of oil and gas through a series of geological surveys, which vastly mitigates the likelihood that you will spend tens of millions of dollars drilling and find nothing. Not wildcatting is the smart, modern way of doing things. Wildcatting is when you just look at some land and think: “Well, what the fuck. Let's see if there’s anything down there.” There is a certain romance to this approach—it’s said that in the old days, true landmen could just sense the presence of oil. But no, of course they couldn’t, and Tommy dislikes this irresponsible hokum. But Cooper has some hunches, and he takes a loan out and leases some land, and lo and behold, he strikes oil everywhere. Six drill sites, six hits. The luck of this is inconceivable—like drawing a hundred inside straights in a row in poker—and the implication is that he will enjoy Croesus-like wealth as a consequence. But no—a complication. It turns out the mysterious financial services company he took the loan to lease the land from is actually a front for a Mexican drug cartel—the same one Tommy had to deal with in the pilot—and now Tommy has to get involved because Cooper has once again got himself into something he didn’t understand. And that’s what you get for wildcatting.
What happened to Monty?
Monty died (Hamm presumably had a hard out because of Your Friends & Neighbors). Jerry Jones and Tommy visited him in the hospital after yet another cardiac episode at the end of the first season. Jerry Jones says, basically, that his favorite part of owning the Dallas Cowboys is working with his kids. I can’t remember if Monty has kids—if so, they aren’t much discussed—but the point Jerry Jones is trying to make is this: chill out. Tommy agrees. Chill out, Monty. His loving but long-suffering wife Cami (Demi Moore) enjoys being married to a man who looks like Jon Hamm, and Tommy tries in vain to persuade Monty to sell his company and be content being a billionaire who looks like Jon Hamm. Nothing doing, though. Monty is a junkie, and oil and gas is his drug of choice. So, he dies.
Now Cami is devastated and Tommy has lost his best friend, but Tommy also kinda becomes the president of M-Tex Oil, which is a different job than just managing surface leases and catastrophic airplane-truck collisions. But Cami technically owns M-Tex Oil and she, like almost every other woman on Landman, is pretty unhinged. She starts making some fairly ill-advised business decisions, including some big-ticket wildcatting that costs $400 million in drilling costs, with only an estimated 10 percent chance of striking oil. Bad odds. Tommy objects on principle. The same drug dealer who floated Cooper his loan, played by a slick Andy Garcia, decides to front the money for Cami’s boondoggle, with onerous contractual terms. That’s even worse. Tommy cannot talk sense to her, no matter how hard he tries. And try he does—until she fires him. Unbelievable. Thirty years of service to M-Tex Oil, and swept out like ashes in a stovetop fireplace. He’ll chew this over with a cigarette and a Michelob Ultra.
Hey, you keep talking about Michelob Ultra. Why?
Because it’s delicious. Imagine yourself on a broiling West Texas afternoon. You are running yourself ragged down the dusty highways between Midland and Odessa. Say you used to be a pretty heavy boozer, and now you’re sober. But hell, you still like beer. So you stop by the Patch Cafe, which is where the workers and the landmen convene to drink and gossip and listen to country music and celebrate and drown their sorrows and occasionally get rowdy. Sort of like the bounty hunters’ tavern in Star Wars, only with more cowboy hats. You go to the bar, and you ask for a Michelob Ultra. The bartender recognizes you (you are Tommy) and has the temerity to ask why, if you don’t really drink anymore, you don’t get a non-alcoholic beer.
This is my favorite scene in Landman. Of all of the things that strain credulity—and there are a lot—I’m not sure if there is any single moment more unlikely than the bartender at the Patch Cafe asking Tommy Norris why he is electing to have a light beer with a 4 percent ABV as opposed to a non-alcoholic beer. Why would he care? It’s so surprising. Tommy says, basically: Look, there is hardly any alcohol in this beer. If I was ordering a stiff drink you might have a point, but I’m a grown man and if I want a Michelob Ultra, I should have a Michelob Ultra, what with all of the stress in my life. “Fair enough,” says the bartender and Tommy gets his Michelob Ultra. Some shows are subtle in their product placement, but then again, some shows are subtle. Landman is not subtle in their branded content for Michelob Ultra, the chosen beer of all recovering alcoholics. I’ve never actually had a Michelob Ultra, but I confess they do look refreshing. I’m not above seeking out a low-calorie alternative with just a hint of citrus twang. In fact, I’ll be right back.
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Now that you're back from the beer store, are there other things I need to know about Landman?
Yeah, of course. There is the emergence of the mysterious T.L. in the second season, played with relish by Sam Elliott. T.L. is Tommy’s estranged father and a former landman himself. In real life, Sam Elliott is 81 and Billy Bob Thornton is 70, which you could get all caught up in if you wanted to, but Landman doesn’t care about such things, and neither should you. They don’t get along, Tommy and T.L. He lives in a nursing home—a different one than the one Angela and Ainsley turn into a roving orgy—and is filled with resentments. Angela insists he come live in the house with everybody else, which raises conflicts but allows Tommy and T.L. to sort out some of their past differences, which is nice. T.L.’s body is suffering from the ravages of time—at one point he falls into the swimming pool and can’t get out. He needs physical therapy, but T.L.’s not doing any physical therapy, so Tommy hires an exotic dancer from a local strip club—the same one Angela and Ainsley take their retirement community olds to—to pretend to do physical therapy. But she’s really just there to flounce around in skimpy clothes, which T.L. likes. Her name is Cheyenne (not her real name). She has a vanity plate that says “HOT LIPPS.” Anyway, another problem solved.
There’s all kinds of other stuff, too. Cooper and Ariana get engaged, but will he be able to appeal to her close-knit, religious family? She has a million dollars, remember, but she goes to work at the Patch Cafe anyway, where trouble predictably ensues. Her baby, truly adorable, disappears without mention for whole episodes at a time. All this time she is bartending late nights at the Patch Cafe, you are thinking, “Ariana, who has the baby?” It’s stressful.
Ainsley gets assigned a roommate for a week-long cheerleading camp at TCU and, get this: The roommate is woke. The whole shebang: they/them pronouns, talks about “safe spaces,” doesn’t like music, meditates, owns a ferret. Horrible. Obviously, this is unworkable for Ainsley, and Angela intervenes, and we realize the poor woke wretch just doesn’t like themselves, which Angela explains after renting a suite at a luxury hotel for the whole cheerleading team to hang out so Ainsley need not be exposed to this any more than necessary. Also, Angela’s going to bankrupt Tommy, as she has once before, and that’s for sure. But what can you do?
This is what it is to be a landman. This shit never stops. The complications are constantly multiplying, just the way that Texas keeps on producing 9.5 trillion metric tons of natural gas, year by year, keeping us in rich fishing boats and antihistamines and lotion. It’s like Tommy Norris keeps telling us: This land was made for you and me.
