- Network: Paramount+
- Series Premiere Date: Nov 17, 2024
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Critic Reviews
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Better than “Goliath," “Landman” lets Thornton convey the emotions that color a “cigarettes and Dr Pepper” kind of guy. The role fits better than a well-worn pair of jeans and, like his trusty boots, never lets him down. He’s one of the best actors of the season in a show that could be one of the best of this or any year.
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Yet another star-powered American drama series from “Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan — the immediately addictive “Landman,” with Billy Bob Thornton delivering a top five career performance in headlining an outstanding ensemble.
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Landman is about good men trying to do a good job, if not an entirely honest one. It’s a strong start to Sheridan’s post-Yellowstone world – and has the potential to be just as successful.
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“Landman” has conspicuous gaps, and some of the disjointedness that characterizes a TV empire with many offshoots and a single author. But these weak points are continually offset by an evocative sense of place not replicated by TV in this corner of the country since “Friday Night Lights.”
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“Landman,” streaming Sunday on Paramount+, is Taylor Sheridan’s best series yet. It’s even more entertaining than “Yellowstone.”
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Landman doesn't break much new ground in the Sheridanverse, but it's a satisfying twist on the formula. As Sheridan imitators proliferate, there's still nothing like the real thing.
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Once again, Sheridan confidently delivers an old-fashioned and gritty melodrama populated with tough-as-nails men and women who never back down from achieving whatever goals they have in mind. This time, however, things happen to be slightly lighter and funnier than expected.
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Landman is pretty much a standard-grade Taylor Sheridan production, but Thornton makes it very watchable, even as he spends half of the first episode making speeches.
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Landman is very much of a piece with Sheridan’s other shows, mixing soap opera and crime drama with earthy observations about The State Of Things.
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The series arguably leans too often into clichés—like an abundance of country music on the soundtrack and scantily clad female characters strolling across the screen—but it also offers an unvarnished look at a contentious industry and the lives tethered to it.
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Renewable energy, the anti-smoking lobby and fussy doctors also get it in the neck but, as usual with a Sheridan creation, the old-school values have an underdog morality at their core that makes Tommy and Landman difficult to hate.
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Playing around in this world is harmless enough and a fine waste of time.
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Unfortunately, this isn't a one-man show, and everyone else--cardboard heroes, villains and especially the caricatured women (including Ali Larter as his spoiled, ridiculous sexpot ex-wife)--could use a tune-up. [9 - 29 Dec 2024, p.4]
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The problems arise when Landman's ambitious scope fails to thread all the necessary needles. The series never truly grapples with the interconnected ecosystem it's trying to depict. The narrative infrastructure rests upon wealth inequality and racism while barely scratching the surface with legitimate or thought-provoking insight.
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The underlying themes — including the world’s reliance on an industry that could destroy the planet — could not be timelier and more provocative. As the episodes progressed, however, and Sheridan proceeded to double, triple, and quadruple down with his tired takes on women, it was hard to maintain that same level of enthusiasm.
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The sheer charisma and loquaciousness of Billy Bob Thornton cover up some of the gaps in the material, but many of the plots and characters feel awfully thin, and others come across so retrograde as to be self-parody.
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Big stars (not always well-used), big melodramatic swings (not always well-executed), and big tonal detours that left me unsure if Landman is meant to be at least semi-comedic. There’s a huge ensemble but very few fully conceived characters, just lots of Stetson-wearing dogmatic monologues waiting to happen.
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“Landman” isn’t fun enough (not that it’s trying to be), funny enough (which it does go for), dramatic enough (beyond the eye-rolling soap opera elements), authentic enough (why else spend all that time watching people work?), or entertaining enough to merit our attention.
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The drama is limp, and the out-of-nowhere jokes make it even worse. .... Thornton's sleepy truth-teller pulls many of his scenes together with his magnetic drawl, but the rest of the cast feels on autopilot. Sheridan, it seems, is tapped out, and there isn't much ink left to mine from his pen. Best move on to the next well.
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The series would be bad enough if it was just dull and insipid, which it is, but it comes with a intensely off-putting bit of male gaze that makes the series read as soft-core porn for old men who want to leer at teenage girls without any repercussions. It verges on outright disgusting, set against a generic setting and plot beats copied from old "Yellowstone" scripts.