Man, does this new Taylor Sheridan drama hate women

No one comes to a Taylor Sheridan joint for nuanced female characters. The prolific screenwriter-producer-director-actor deals with broad (pun intended) tropes: The sexy-boozy viper (Yellowstone‘s Beth Dutton); the sexy-stoic badass (Lioness‘ Agent Joe); the sexy stern matriarch (1923’s Cara Dutton) and so on.

Most of the time, Sheridan—credited as the sole writer of almost every episode of the shows mentioned above—compensates his clichéd female characters with just enough agency to drive some of the story, earn a few laughs, and occasionally even develop as people .

The ladies off Farmer (premiere November 17) are not so lucky. The new Paramount+ drama — based on Boomtown podcast and co-created by Sheridan and Christian Wallace — follows beleaguered oil company fixer Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) as he bounces from crisis to crisis in the dusty West Texas patch. From the crews on the rigs to the suits in the C-suites, the oil business is a male-dominated field, so it makes sense that Farmer‘s female characters mostly live on the periphery. The worrying thing is that the women in Farmer exist solely in the context of how they are perceived by Tommy and his cowboy cohorts—simply put, they are there to distract, annoy, titillate, implore, or yell at the men.

“The oil and gas industry makes $3 billion a day in pure profit,” says Tommy in the series premiere. “Generates over $4.3 trillion a year in revenue.” With such staggering amounts of money at stake, Tommy spends his waking hours walking a legal and ethical tightrope to solve problems for his employer, M*Tex, an independent oil company owned by Monty Miller (Jon Hamm). Whether securing a land lease deal with a Mexican drug cartel or negotiating settlements for women whose men were killed on the rig, Tommy has one goal: keep the oil and money flowing.

Given how dangerous the job of drilling can be, Tommy isn’t thrilled when his son, Cooper (Jacob Lofland), who has ambitions to one day become an oil baron, drops out of college to join a crew of M *Tex roughnecks. And he’s just as upset when his daughter, a bubbly, blonde 17-year-old named Ainsely (Michelle Randolph), crashes in his rental house – which he shares with M*Tex lawyer Nate (Colm Feore) and oil engineer Dale (James Jordan) – for spring break. Although Tommy’s ex-wife, Angela (Ail Larter), is remarried, she delights in blowing up Tommy’s phone, and her approach to co-parenting vacillates between sly seduction and snarky screams.

Very happy Yellowstone, Farmer offers a compelling depiction of the Wild West mayhem and corporate/political deficits required to keep a vital American industry alive. M*Tex and its competitors operate under a sort of shadow code, strategically avoiding laws because following them — like filing a police report when a drug cartel “borrows” one of the company’s jets — could send oil prices plunging and trigger an economic crisis.

“Every company has a version of Tommy. You can’t function without one,” Monty says when his cautious lawyer (Kristoffer Polaha) suggests he let Tommy fall for a deadly explosion at one of his drilling sites. Tommy might not work that way formidable—he’s a two-pack-a-day smoker whose ramshackle body looks like it’s held together with duct tape and spackle—but the man is relentless in his problem solving.After being injured in an on-site accident, Tommy chooses to chop off the severed tip of his pinky with a pocketknife rather than wait for proper medical attention.“I’m not walking around with 12 surgeries for half a year,” he tells the horrified ER doctor (Jake Olson).

Thornton manages to make this kind of exaggerated machismo immensely entertaining. In the field, Tommy meets his opponents with twisted resentment and flickering defiance; at home, he uses a smooth Southern baritone and good-old-boy charm to placate the disheveled women in his life. It is worth noting that none of the men in Farmerincluding Tommy, are portrayed as saints. They are broken, sexist, sloppy, selfish, greedy, condescending, ignorant and more. But Tommy and his male peers are three-dimensional disasters; the women, on the other hand, are completely defined by their gender.

When Angela isn’t spending her days drinking margaritas or twerking in Tommy’s living room (“just trying to keep the peach plump,” she says), she’s climbing over her ex-husband, whom she hopes to win back. Why? Hard to say. By his own admission, Tommy is “a divorced alcoholic $500,000 in debt” and his marriage to Angela was an unmitigated failure. Maybe she’s just feeling insecure because she’s “aging out of cougar” — which is an actual line of dialogue that Ali Larter has to say. (Despite what it says on the page, the actress brings an affecting undercurrent of sadness to Angela’s sexy facade.) Ainsley, meanwhile, is devastated when her chubby boyfriend (Drake Rodger) moves on to another cheerleader: “How could he that? She’s a f—ing brunette!”

There is one woman in the M*Tex boys’ club: Rebecca Falcone (Kayla Wallace), a hard-charging young lawyer who keeps her pretty face in a “don’t mess with me” look. After a somewhat unfortunate first outing with Tommy – where he tells her the oil industry and then I save her from a rattlesnake – Rebecca shows her mettle in the boardroom, dismantling the arguments of the sexist alpha male. opposing counsel during a deposition. “You think they hired me because I’m pretty?” she snaps. “I’ll take $900 an hour, you asshole.”

That’s the type you-go-girl triumph as only a man could script. Sheridan, who is credited as the sole writer on the first five episodes of Farmermight think the character of Rebecca serves as a counterbalance to the show’s overt sexism, but he’s just indulging another gross stereotype: The sexy, man-hating ball-buster.

Readers, we haven’t even gotten to Demi Moore yet. The extremely famous actress who plays Monty’s elegant wife, Cami, features prominently in ads for Farmer. However, she doesn’t have much in the first half of the season. (Paramount+ made five of the drama’s 10 episodes available for review.) When she’s on screen, Cami doesn’t make much of an impression: She swims laps in her backyard pool; she encourages Monty to take his blood pressure medication; she cheers on her daughter (Dani Raen) at a track meet. In one episode, Cami wordlessly makes a smoothie in the background and then disappears. I’m not an optimist by nature, but I’m choosing to believe that Monty’s wife will have a burst of relevance in the back five episodes, because the alternative – Sheridan casting an A-list actress as window-dressing – is just too depressing .

Lest Mr. Sheridan think I’m being too harsh, let me clarify: I’m not mad, sir, just disappointed. Farmer‘s pilot is fantastic and I praised it as such. The underlying themes – including the world’s dependence on an industry that can destroy the planet – could not be more timely and provocative. As the episodes progressed and Sheridan continued to double, triple and quadruple his tired attitudes towards women, it was hard to maintain the same level of enthusiasm.

In another disheartening exchange, Tommy scoffs when Rebecca suggests that a sex worker at the local diner might not have other options for employment. “She had a choice,” he laughs. “And she took a shortcut, which is always the longest way.” Aside from the harsh moralizing and the surprising lack of empathy, Tommy has a point. Shortcuts—whether in life or in screenwriting—often lead to subpar results. Grade: C-

The first two episodes of Farmer premieres Sunday, November 17 on Paramount+.