Billy Bob Thornton’s Taylor Sheridan Paramount+ Show

The line we so often use to describe a talented artist is that we would pay to listen to them read the phone book.

No one in 2024 knows what a phone book is.

Perhaps it is time for a rhetorical modification. We could hail artists as being so talented that we would pay to listen to them recite a rambling, pseudo-poetic treatise on the nobility of the oil industry.

Sure, the phrase might not be useful in every context. But that’s the healthiest way to approach Paramount+ Farmerthe latest series from the one-man assembly line that is Taylor Sheridan. For the sake of this drama, he’s abandoned any pretense of writing — and with him also directing the first two episodes, this might be Taylor Sheridan’s most Taylor Sheridan-esque show to date.

That means big stars (not always well-used), big melodramatic swings (not always well-executed) and big tonal detours that left me unsure whether Farmer is meant to be at least semi-comic. There’s a large ensemble but very few fully fleshed out characters, just lots of Stetson-wearing dogmatic monologues waiting to happen. It’s downright entertaining and downright annoying, punctuated by the excesses of a producer that no one ever says no to.

That is, it’s exactly the show that consumers of the Taylor Sheridan industrial complex are likely to demand—but since he rarely allows any hunger to develop between his individual titles, “demand” might be a strong word.

Oh, and it has Billy Bob Thornton, who is definitely an actor so talented that I would willingly listen to him recite rambling, pseudo-poetic treatises on the nobility of the oil industry. Which is a good thing because Farmer offers a lot of them.

Thornton plays Tommy Norris, who serves a nebulous Mr. Fix-It role for an independent oil company owned by the impeccably coiffed Monty (Jon Hamm) and operating out of West Texas. (As a joke, Tommy even attends the game for the Permian High School football team that Thornton fictionally coached Friday night light.)

Tommy is a mess. Or he comes off as a mess. A recovering alcoholic – he drinks a lot of Michelob Ultra, one of many very proud product placements – with deep debt stemming from oil prospecting, he has a son who dropped out of college to work in the oil fields (Jacob Loflands Cooper) , a teenage daughter who talks like a porn star (Michelle Randolph’s Ainsley) and an ex-wife who likes to flirt with him via FaceTime (Ali Larter’s Angela).

He also pontificates like this: “There are two types of people who work in the patch: dreamers and losers. It used to be like that across the nation. Failure went out west to either die or succeed. All the way to California. But there’s no more dreamers out there. This is where the dreamers come in. Which one are you going to be?”

Tommy loves to monologue and he loves oil. If many of the petroleum-based facts he enjoys sharing with people are patently wrong, you can’t say that Farmer is wrong because Tommy Norris is a huckster for the oil industry. Just because a character says something doesn’t mean his series believes it, just that it doesn’t have time for someone to make a counterargument without being mocked.

Tommy’s job is everything. He secures land lease agreements. He handles local law enforcement. He makes tough business calls, but only after asking Monty’s permission. Things are a little disastrous around the patch these days: A truck crashed into a stolen plane in the middle of a drug deal, and things went boom. The oil platforms become dangerous and also make things tense. There are actually many things that are booming. Consequently, Tommy is forced to work with harried lawyer Rebecca (Kayla Wallace), who is here to alternately be offended by the stupid things TV creators think Gen Z people are offended by — “stupid things ” as sexism and ageism – and verbally castrate men.

Tommy lives in a housing development McMansion that has become a halfway house for temporarily visiting oil workers, including engineer Dale (James Jordan) and lawyer Nate (Colm Feore), and an occasional buffer for the spring-breaking Ainsley, who causes hilarity to follow.

By the way, here’s what Farmer seems amusing: Ainsley is referred to several times as being 17. Randolph, who plays Ainsley, is in his mid-20s and looks roughly mid-20s. This allows every shot of Ainsley to linger on her bottom, to the point that the only thing we know about Nate besides his job is that he’s very distracted by Ainsley parading around the house in her underwear . If Canada declares war on the United States in the next three months, a leading motivation will be to cast national treasure Colm Feore in a role that asks him to convincingly wear a cowboy hat and, more convincingly, try to avoid looking on a teenage girl.

If you’ve ever heard the term “male gaze” and didn’t understand what it meant, I recommend checking out the two Sheridan-directed chapters of Farmer and observe how the two primary pieces of cinematic grammar are seemingly endless montages of people working on oil rigs at sunset, and shots in which the camera actively seeks out the derriere of a teenager whose non-butt-related defining characteristic is her childlike desire for her mother and father to reunite. None of this is Randolph’s fault, but it is hugely icky.

Sheridan’s series always walk a delicately uncomfortable line with their female characters. You get the full lineup here, including Saintly Woman of Color (Paulina Chavez, if Ariana is either the show’s most likable character or a master manipulator), Oversensitive Cutthroat, Stereotypical Manipulative First Wife, Sexy Bikini Barista, and What the Heck Is Demi Moore Doing Her?

Moore plays Cami, Monty’s wife. Out of the five episodes sent to critics, she spends two swimming laps in a pool, one cheering on a track meet for a daughter who is never mentioned at any other time, and the other telling Monty he should work out more. It would be possible if her name wasn’t in the opening credits to not even realize it’s Moore in the role because the show is so completely uninterested in her presence.

Mind you, I can’t rule out the possibility that she’ll eventually get one of those operatic Sheridan monologues to validate this use of her time. Hamm is hardly used at all (though still much more than Moore) for most of those episodes, but in the fifth he gets a quality rant about the stupidity of oil and natural gas opponents, which I can only assume was presented to him ahead of time as lure for his participation. Nevertheless, the gulf in quality material between this and his Emmy nominees shows Fargo is huge.

So who actually has material worthy of their talents?

Well, it starts with Thornton. “Drawling salesman” has always been one of his best modes. Whether he’s standing up to tough-talking drug lords and local police or talking down the lawyer who’s either there to protect him or get him thrown in jail, he’s the man capable of delivering Sheridan’s most muscular and profane dialogue to sound human, and his most frivolous bouts of word salad sound muscular and profane. Thornton is also really good with Larter, playing the one person Tommy struggles to stand up to. Larter is genuinely and effectively funny in an over-the-top way that doesn’t match anything in the rest of the show, but which I have no doubt is intentional. (For another point of illustration of the male gaze, check out how Stephen Kay, director of the third through fifth episodes, films Larter.)

Elsewhere, Wallace delivers her one big monologue, but Rebecca is written to be so unappealing in the scenes leading up to it that it’s hard for the character to return. Lofland has a natural discomfort that works well for a character who has decided that he wants to participate in a world that is completely foreign to him – although Cooper spends about 10 minutes doing gardening in a 64-minute fifth episode, there might be the 64-minute episode. least worthy of being 64 minutes in the Peak TV era. Michael Peña and Emilio Rivera very quickly establish very signature characters, but they are not used much.

You can generally see why this was a subject that appealed to Sheridan, who is credited as a co-creator along with Boomtown podcast host Christian Wallace. Oil as well as cattle (Yellowstone) and prisons (Mayor of Kingstown), are all recurring industries that feel connected to Manifest Destiny and the Old West. They are capitalism, writ large, and you can have your characters babble incessantly about the price of barrels of oil or the mechanics of a failing rig, and the audience will understand the broad strokes. Sheridan likes the ugliness of people who get rich too fast and the pathos of people who go broke too soon, the nobility of men who can pull off a cowboy hat and the meanness of women who know when to whine and when they must feed themselves.

This story has all of those things, conveyed without the filter that might have come from a more collaborative process. But what Sheridan fans want Sheridan to have a filter anyway? He makes testosterone-fueled soap operas for people who want to pretend they’re too macho to watch soap operas, and this one has Billy Bob Thornton in fine form.

You absolutely know if you are the target audience.