What if ‘Yellowstone’ but worse and with oil?

On By Littum

There are few character types on television that being the only guy who knows how to get things done on a Taylor Sheridan show would seem quite as exhausting. From Kevin Costner Yellowstone to Jeremy Renner on Mayor of Kingstown — and now Billy Bob Thornton on Sheridan’s new drama Farmer – these men are constantly running from one crisis to the next, all someone else’s fault, no one else seems to have the first clue how to solve them.

Every writer puts something of themselves into the characters they write, and it’s not hard to draw a line from Costner’s John Dutton or Thornton’s Tommy Norris to their creator, who has become a one-man TV drama factory in the six years since. Yellowstone debuted. Farmer is the eighth of Sheridan’s series to premiere in that period. With some shows, e.g King of Tulsahe will delegate responsibility, but he often prefers to do as much as possible himself. Although there was a short period in Yellowstone Season two, in which Sheridan co-wrote episodes, the vast majority of the series is credited only to him as a writer. This year alone, his will be the only name on the scripts for 24 different hours of television, between Yellowstone, Farmerand Lioness (formerly known as Special Ops: Lioness). He also periodically directs episodes of his shows, especially at the start, handles other producing duties, and continually develops ideas for new series, whether set in Yellowstone universe or not.

Sheridan is far from the first showrunner to hold onto the reins of his series so well, and this year is nowhere near a record either. There was one TV season in which Aaron Sorkin wrote or co-wrote 36 different episodes Sports night and The West Wingand another in which David E. Kelley wrote or co-wrote 47 different episodes of Practice and Ally McBeal. That Sheridan’s shows do shorter seasons than what Sorkin, Kelley or Shonda Rhimes used to do evens things out somewhat. Nevertheless, he makes one lot of jobs on a lot of different shows at once, and his explanation for this in interviews, it sounds like something one of his leading men might say: In the end, no one understands this terrain as well as Taylor Sheridan himself.

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But as the one with so much control over the fictional lives of John Dutton and company, Sheridan is also probably best placed to recognize the limitations of this solo approach to problem solving. Because his protagonists are always so overextended, their solutions more often than not inadvertently lead to even more disasters, which again only they can solve. And the more (cowboy) hats that Taylor Sheridan tries to wear, the more worn the finished product becomes. Farmer often plays as if someone else asked ChatGPT to make a Sheridan-esque drama, or as if Sheridan wrote rough first drafts of each script and simply ran out of time or energy to polish them into the versions he wants people to see. Billy Bob Thornton’s sheer charisma and talkativeness cover up some of the gaps in the material, but many of the plots and characters feel terribly thin, and others come off as so retrograde as to be self-parodies.

Like most of Sheridan’s work, Farmer is a slick eighties primetime soap opera dressed up as a modern anti-hero drama. Dallas with cursing, more violence and nudity. We are introduced to Tommy in a vulnerable place, where he is held at gunpoint by a drug cartel enforcer. They have a difficult problem to solve: the cartel owns a piece of land outside of Midland, Texas

but Tommy’s billionaire boss Monty (Jon Hamm) owns the mineral rights to all the oil lurking beneath that land. The cartel wants to be left alone, and would happily use Tommy’s dead boy to make that happen. However, Tommy could talk the skin off a snake, and even with a burlap sack over his face, he’s able to spin a variation of “We’re not so different, you and me” that spares his life and earns Monty his lease to drill on the ground. Tommy doesn’t get a chance in that moment to talk about how West Texas used to be a place with black and white morals, while now everyone has to operate within shades of gray, but I’m assuming that will come before the season finale.

Related content Midland’s sister city Odessa was the setting Friday night light movie that Thornton starred in, and one episode even sees him take in a game with the Permian Panthers, the team he coached in the movie. The Farmer opening credits and theme song, meanwhile, rather shamelessly echo Friday night light the television program. Vibes and level of execution are otherwise extremely different between them Farmerand both versions of

FNL

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From there we are introduced to the rest of Tommy’s friends and family. His son Cooper (Jacob Lofland) has dropped out of college to learn the oil business from scratch, working on a drilling crew with veterans Luis (Emilio Rivera) and Armando (Michael Peña). His spoiled teenage daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) flies in to spend the weekend at the corporate McMansion Tommy shares with lawyer Nathan (Colm Feore) and engineer Dale (James Jordan) and ends up staying. And Tommy’s business is often interrupted by FaceTime calls with his bitter ex-wife Angela (Ali Larter). As various problems explode – several of them literally – Monty is also forced to seek outside advice in the form of Rebecca (Kayla Wallace), whose youth and sharp-eyed attitude gets her on Tommy’s bad side.

Tommy is presented as a man who has thoroughly screwed up his own life and career, and he now works as Monty’s fixer after being forced to give up his own dreams of being an oil baron. He is $500,000 in debt, has long been estranged from both his children as well as Angela, and is an alcoholic who insists that he can get away with drinking beer because there is so little alcohol in it. But the show treats him as correct on any subject, under any circumstances. Even when he makes a mistake – such as contemplating a reconciliation with Angela when she comes to town—he walks in, admitting it’s a mistake and that he’s powerless to resist it. Tommy, who always knows the right answer, throws nearly every interaction he has with other characters wildly off balance, and it’s only Thornton’s basic charm that makes much of the material watchable despite that. Sheridan ends most Tommy scenes by giving him a clue to show how smart he is, but they tend to be pretty weak, like when he hangs up on Angela by saying, “Enjoy the beach. Your boobs look great. Don’t get syphilis!” Hamm, meanwhile, might as well not even be on the show. Despite seemingly being grown in a lab to front a Taylor Sheridan series about the changing American character and the dwindling spaces for a certain kind of man’s man, Hamm is instead relegated to being a guy in a suit, popping up now and then to look displeased. while fielding phone calls from Tommy about the latest oil field mess. In one episode, Monty has to deliver a pencil sketch of a Don Draper speech about how we all need the oil industry, even though everyone complains about it and what it’s doing to the climate. But even that seems unnecessary, because Tommy has already given a similar lecture to Rebecca. This is a show that often repeats its ideas, maybe because it doesn’t have much to say, maybe because it just needs to fill the time by any means necessary. (For some reason, the fifth episode runs 64 minutes, which includes a long montage of Cooper mowing and weeding someone else’s lawn.)Jon Hamm and Demi Moore in

Farmer

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Emerson Miller/Paramount+

But if Hamm has almost nothing to do, Demi Moore has less to do as his wife Cami, whose only notable scene in the early episodes is encouraging Monty to take his pills and exercise more regularly. And simply by virtue of being so foreign, Cami turns out to be the least badass female character on the show. Every other woman is some combination of mute, hypersexualized, angry, humorless or shrill. Many of Angela’s conversations with Tommy involve her alternately screaming at him and offering sexual favors. Rebecca is a progressive curmudgeon who thinks she’s too good for these people and their business, and is very obviously being set up to have the pants charmed off her (perhaps metaphorically, but probably literally) by Tommy. (When she objects to him referring to her as “the lady” to a bartender, he snaps back, “Oh, did I guess wrong? Sorry, sir.”)

And then there’s Ainsley, a 17-year-old played by an actor in his late twenties — who looks like an actor in his late twenties — whose primary function is to wander through scenes in his underwear, a bikini, or other skimpy. outfits and make all of her father’s middle-aged friends uncomfortable with how attractive they find this teenager. Every scene she is in is crude, retrograde and insulting to the intelligence of both this character and the audience. At one point — in a scene that debuts in our Lord’s year 2024 — Ainsley is upset to open Instagram and see an ex-boyfriend with another girl, screaming, “How could he? She’s a fucking brunette!” Larter, Feore, and Thornton occasionally wring a laugh or two out of these things through their sheer energy, as long as you can ignore how misogynistic most of the writing is.

The most effective material comes in Cooper’s interactions with Luis and his crew, who come across as actual people rather than functionaries of the show’s plots, and which suggest there’s a compelling story to be told about the mechanics of blue-collar life in an oil boomtown. But Rivera and Peña are written out very early, the series quickly loses community interest, and Luis and Armando’s replacements are cartoon characters there simply to cause trouble for Cooper and create even more fires for Tommy to put out. Trending storiesTommy, Monty and others often talk about the dangers of being in a business dependent on a rapidly dwindling natural resource that they believe has no realistic replacement. They just want to do whatever they can to pump out the oil and the money while they still can, the consequences. Perhaps Sheridan insists on doing so much of the work himself because he’s worried that the television industry is similarly headed for extinction, and that he’d best write as many episodes as he possibly can while there’s still places for him to do it. . There are interesting raw materials in it

Farmer as is in pretty much everything Sheridan does. But to get it off the ground and afloat, Sheridan might want to stop trying to do it all himself. The first two episodes of

Farmer began streaming November 17 on Paramount+, with additional episodes released weekly. I’ve seen the first five.