Billy Bob Thornton stars in Landman, which airs on Paramount+, as Tommy Norris, the fixer for a (fictional) West Texas oil drilling company called M-Tex.Emerson Miller/The Associated Press
I have seen MAGA’s America, and it is Landman. A week before Donald Trump’s second inauguration as U.S. President, this Paramount+ series – from the prolific writer/director/actor Taylor Sheridan, 54, who also created Yellowstone and its two prequels, plus Mayor of Kingstown, Lioness and Tulsa Kings – wrapped up its first season in typically florid fashion.
(MAGA, obviously, is the acronym for U.S. right wingers whose slogan is Make America Great Again. The folks in the show don’t explicitly call themselves MAGA, but the attitude is clear.)
In that season finale, title character Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton, really sinking his teeth in), the fixer for a (fictional) West Texas oil drilling company called M-Tex, delivered not only a pro-gun speech – about how West Texans wave at each other when they’re driving because everyone is armed – but also a pro-fracking speech, about how our great-grandparents built a world that runs on oil, “and we gotta feed it or the world stops. … The moral high ground gets real windy at night.”
Meanwhile, Norris’s new girlfriend, Angela (Ali Larter) – who’s also his ex-wife – and their 17-year-old daughter, Ainsley (Michelle Randolph), did their “charity work”: They brought a van load of senior citizens to a strip club. (Both women are, in Norris’s phrase, “hotterna two-dollar Rolex.” Everything they wear is short, tight and bejewelled, including the crosses that dangle in their cleavages.) Ainsley’s high-school quarterback boyfriend, Ryder, was one of the strippers; he crossed himself before taking off his pants. “This is not crazy, baby,” Ainsley reassured him. “This is free.”
In the final scene, a drug kingpin (Andy Garcia), who often “borrows” M-Tex’s planes and trucks to import his product, told Norris that oilmen and drug runners should be friends because they hold sway over the same lawmen, senators and presidents – all of whose hands are otherwise tied by unworkable border policies and environmental regulations. The new Wild West indeed.
Until I saw Landman, I thought Yellowstone was the most stand-your-ground, America-first series ever, with its reverence for cowboyin’ and Big Beef, its insistence that vigilante justice – including murder – is both necessary and correct, and its depiction of working folks and billionaires as equally aggrieved. At first, the show’s politics didn’t make sense to me – there was a lot of self-contradiction. Then I realized they make 21st-century-America sense: not Republican as it was once understood, but rather a slurry of cultural conservatism, libertarianism, scorn for wokeism, and proud self-contradiction. (In 2017, Sheridan supported Trump’s impeachment; when his conservative viewers objected, he walked that back.) It’s all God, guns in the glovebox and get off my lawn – unless I like you, and then it’s come on in, hon, and I’ll fix you a plate.
But Landman, whoa – Landman makes Yellowstone look like PBS. Like everything in Texas, it’s both bonkers and compulsively watchable. M-Tex is a wildcat (indie) oil company owned by Norris’s oldest friend, Monty Miller (Jon Hamm). Norris is Miller’s cowboy boots on the ground: He negotiates with everyone from Mexican drug dealers whose product burned in a fiery plane crash to Mexican-American widows whose spouses burned in a fiery well explosion. Norris also contends with Angela’s (very loud) mood swings and demands, and Ainsley’s in-his-face sex life. The stakes are high, the steaks are chicken-fried and the music is always country.
Sheridan does his research: His series revolve around informed, nuanced compacts and conflicts – between Indigenous land developers and wealthy white ranchers on Yellowstone; among convicts, gangs and law enforcement in Mayor of Kingstown – and Landman is no exception. Every episode made me think anew about the deals and deceits that power the world.
But it’s also exhausting. Every week, I come away feeling like I’ve been slapped. Everyone is aggressive. Everyone insists on winning. (Miller won’t even let fellow golfers play through: “I don’t wait on anybody,” he announces.) Every joke is crass bordering on creepy, about two-headed whores or exploding colostomy bags. Every few minutes, Norris delivers a pro-oil screed. One in particular, about the number of products that contain petroleum – tennis racquets, lipstick, refrigerators, antihistamines, artificial heart valves and so on – went viral after Ted Cruz, the Republican Senator from Texas, posted it on X.
Of course, everyone is pro-oil. The roughnecks on “the Patch” – the working men Sheridan purports to love – scorn government regulations, even though unsafe equipment frequently maims and kills them. The billionaires who attend fancy dinners applaud speeches about thwarting green energy policies. Even Ryder, during a romantic swim in a reservoir lit by the burning gas of an oil well, coos to Ainsley about how wind turbines kill whales.
And don’t get me started on the depiction of women. Demi Moore plays Miller’s elegant wife, but her entire role consists of swimming in their infinity pool and murmuring when it’s time for him to take his heart pills. Angela is a harridan obsessed with her butt and her Bentley – her ring tone on Norris’s phone is horror movie music – and when she annoys him, he feels fully entitled to throw her into a pool. When he threatens to straddle and choke her, she replies, “That’s hot.”
Here’s Angela’s motherly advice to Ainsley: “My only job is to make my man happy. Then he will buy me the things that make me happy … and I will reward him with sex. That’s the way the world works, honey.” Ainsley heeds it, skipping school to shop, tan and twerk; her stated ambition is to marry an NFL quarterback and start a foundation – as a tax shelter for his enormous salary. (So frequent are the shots of her shapely backside, the production must have a designated camera trained on it at all times.)
Most offensive is Rebecca (Kayla Wallace), the lawyer M-Tex flies in from the East Coast. She’s the only woman in the show with a serious career and, therefore, a villain. Whip-smart but whiny, hostile and humourless, she represents everything that is Gen Z, green and woke – that is, non-Texan. Which means that in every episode Norris gleefully schools her about how things really are. When she asks that he not call her “the lady,” he replies, “Oh, did I guess wrong? I’m sorry, sir, and hats off to your plastic surgeon.” After one altercation, he actually kicks her chair out from under her, and we’re supposed to smile because she “deserves” it. The only “good” women in Landman’s world are the Mexican widows and the waitresses who serve men – especially the owner of a drive-through coffee kiosk called Babes-N-Brew, whose predawn uniform is unzipped shorts over a pink bikini.
What makes Landman especially MAGA is its claim to being the “real” America. Dreamers used to go to California, Norris says, “but there are no dreamers there any more, only thieves and fools. This is where dreamers come now.” It’s a nasty dream, though, embodied by massive machinery, dead grasses, lonely, dusty roads and burnt skies. Because if people trust only themselves, they’re not going to be good neighbours. If the grace they say at dinner is, like Angela’s, “Help us to celebrate You by living our very best life,” they’re not going to be compassionate. (Just ask Republican Mike Johnson, the U.S. Speaker of the House, who said there should be “conditions” attached to any aid for the Americans who have lost the more than 12,000 homes, businesses and public buildings in the Los Angeles wildfires, just because their state leans Democrat. He calls himself a Christian, too.)
In the America of Landman, everyone disdains the government and the justice system, takes the law into their own hands and then complains that things are lawless. It’s the “real” America, all right, if by that you mean it’s not the ideal one.
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