Taylor Sheridan’s medium oil drama

Looking back, it’s strange that Billy Bob Thornton first became famous for the Oscar-winning 1996 indie Sling bladea film where his character mostly communicates in grunts. Thornton is one of the great talkers of the big and small screen, who is skilled at laying down a line of patterns that is at once amusing and fascinating. It’s a skill he uses a lot as the star of writer-producer Taylor Sheridan’s new Paramount+ series Farmer. As an oil company fixer named Tommy Norris—the kind of skilled, dirty field worker who greases palms and puts out fires—Thornton never misses an opportunity to riff. In a voice halfway between a grumpy growl and a relaxed twang—and in colorfully profane terms—Tommy tells everyone within earshot what he knows to be true, whether they like it or not.

All this makes Tommy Norris part of a line of Sheridan protagonists who claim to see clearly the inevitable ruin of our world, yet are determined to do what must be done to protect their part of it. He has a lot in common with Dwight Manfredi King of TulsaJoe in LionessMike McClusky i Mayor of Kingstown and – the progenitor of them all – John Dutton III i Yellowstone.

The big difference? Tommy is doing better. He’s much, much funnier. It is impossible to say Farmer is a comedy. Co-created by Sheridan and Christian Wallace – and based on the Wallace-hosted podcast Boomtownon the mess of the oil play in Texas’ Permian Basin—Farmer 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.

Thornton stars alongside Jon Hamm, who plays Monty Miller, the head of M-Tex, Tommy’s employer. The two go back decades together in the oil business, after riding out several booms. (The 2020 pandemic recession nearly wiped them out, turning their Midland, Texas home base into a ghost town, we’re told.) When Tommy isn’t lecturing anyone about the realities of oil, Monty steps in to make more or less the same points.

But they never do it in the same scene – at least not in the five Farmer episodes that Paramount+ provided to critics. Hamm and Thornton only interact by phone in the beginning. The fifth episode ends with the promise of a face-to-face meeting; but before that, this show’s two main characters are revealed in their own stories. And indeed, calling Monty’s scattered scenes a “story” is a stretch. Demi Moore plays his wife Cami, but she barely appears so far, only appearing to remind her husband to take his heart pills. That’s the extent of the plot directly involving the Millers up to this point: Monty has health issues.

To be fair, Monty also deals – remotely, via cell – with the same crises that occupy Tommy. IN Farmer’s first episode, a drug cartel steals an M-Tex plane and lands it on a private road as part of their smuggling operation; and then a big truck comes barreling through, causing a fatal accident that also destroys millions of dollars worth of dope. The bloody mess spawns a federal investigation, a lawsuit and cartel threats. M-Tex’s problems are compounded with a well explosion, witnessed by Cooper Norris (Jacob Lofland), Tommy’s son, who is trying to follow in his father’s uneven footsteps.

As for the women in this show, aside from the barely appearing Cami Miller, there are four main female characters, each of whom more or less falls into one of Sheridan’s usual types. Ali Larter has the most sensational role as Tommy’s ex-wife, Angela, a larger-than-life sensualist who left him for a billionaire during one of the busts but now wants back into his life. Michelle Randolph plays their teenage daughter, Ainsley, who shares her mother’s penchant for skimpy outfits and self-centered choices, and repeatedly fails to read the room. Sheridan seems to love these kinds of broad female characters: forces of nature who drive the men in their lives crazy—and not always willingly.

Kayla Wallace comes in at the opposite end of the spectrum as Rebecca Savage, a young but ruthless lawyer who hates the environmental damage and institutional chauvinism of the oil business and is as vocal about her point of view as Tommy is about his – only with less sense of humor. Then there’s Ariana (Paulina Chávez), the widow of a Mexican-American roughneck, who bonds with Cooper and leans on him when her community friends and family aren’t around.

Anyone who has seen more than a few episodes of Yellowstone will probably recognize parts of the show’s Beth, Monica, Summer, Mia and Laramie: all those Taylor Sheridan women who tend to fall into slots labeled “steely” or “wild” or “bruised.” They will probably also recognize Sheridan’s typical narrative pace Farmerwhere not much happens for the better part of an hour until suddenly something shocking or violent (or both) occurs.

In fact, there are times when Farmer barely feels like a TV series and more like an op-ed peppered with the occasional explosion. That it’s also fairly easy to watch is a testament to Sheridan’s ability to hold an audience’s attention. His shows always begin with a strong hook and a lot of promise.

On the bright side: Farmer is the most overtly Texas-bound show since Friday night light. (That connection is reinforced by the Andrew Lockington score, which sounds a lot like Explosions In The Sky and WG Snuffy Walden.) Sherdian, who wrote each of the first five episodes and directed the first two, has long had an eye for the unique qualities of remote American space, be it in Montana or Oklahoma or the fictional Rustbelt city of Mayor of Kingstown. He finds a few of the funky places here, like a coffee kiosk staffed by bikini-clad baristas serving all the oil workers who are up before dawn, and the combination dining room and bar that only has breakfast and dinner menus, because “lunch” ” is not really a thing in the Permian oil field.

Farmer is also full of fascinating details about the oil industry, which attracts the kind of people who are willing (or have no choice but to) work around the clock, accept that any given day may bring death, and pack up and leave place when times get lean. Even Tommy, who has lived in the basin for decades, describes it as “not home” and behaves accordingly – including sharing a rented house with other M-Tex employees.

But the main reason to see Farmer is Thornton. He brings real juice to speeches that shouldn’t be as entertaining as they are: pissy little rants about clean-energy zealots, sex workers, anti-smoking regulations, government bureaucracy, rapacious bankers and whatever else gets under his skin. moment. Tommy is annoying, but he’s also easy to root for because he’s constantly dropping corny rants, standing up for M-Tex’s employees, and using Big Oil’s indomitability as an excuse to push around hypocrites and sleazebags.

Even the first time we meet Tommy, Thornton’s performance is riveting. IN Farmerthe opening scene, he’s tied up in a cartel hideout and lays out the land lease terms the drug lords will have to accept unless they want their territory overrun with Halliburton mercenaries and DEA agents. Thornton has a bag on his head at the time; but he still has that voiceweathered yet pleasantly lilting. Sometimes that’s enough.

Farmer premieres November 17 on Paramount+