Taylor Sheridan Oil Drama Engrosses

Taylor Sheridan became one of TV’s most powerful creators with an epic saga set on a ranch, but his latest protagonist has little patience for agrarian fantasy. The rancher giving Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) a lecture isn’t really a rancher, the professional fixer claims: “You’re an oilman who spends the money we give you on cattle.” For his latest drama on Paramount+, Sheridan has turned his attention to the black, oozing lifeblood of his native Texas. “Landman” has the masculine bravado and conservative milieu of “Yellowstone,” Sheridan’s flagship red-state soap opera, but also builds an immersive, detailed world in the sun-baked Permian Basin that grounds the show in observed reality.

It is not a coincidence. Per Sheridan’s typical practice, the producer wrote each script but shares a creator credit with Christian Wallace, host of the Texas Monthly podcast “Boomtown,” which serves as the series’ source material. Wallace himself spent time working in the oil fields, a first-hand experience that shows in Norris’ skillful maneuvering and the daily routine of his son Cooper (Jacob Lofland), who drops out of college to begin grueling, dangerous work on the rigs.

“Landman” is at its strongest when using Thornton’s always compelling screen presence to guide the viewer through the vagaries of the oil and gas industry, including potential alternatives and the looming threat of climate change. The first scene shows Norris negotiating a lease with a cartel soldier through the bag over his head, pointing out that both are dealing highly addictive drugs: “Ours is just bigger.” The exchange is a sensationalized, adrenalized way to lecture audiences on unsexy topics like the difference between surface and mineral rights.

Although once the captain of his own venture, Norris now serves as master of the fictional M-Tex Oil, headed by billionaire businessman Monty Miller (Jon Hamm). Monty spends his days in wood paneling and high-flying jets, while Tommy walks the pavement managing day-to-day affairs. This endeavor takes “Landman” on a tour of the idiosyncratic landscape of the oil industry: the sad McMansion Tommy shares as a rented bachelor with a couple of M-Tex buddies; the privately financed roads where cartels often “borrow” trucks or even planes while the owners look the other way; the coffee house, where an endless line of M-Tex pickups queue up at the drive-thru every day before dawn.

Although tired and weary, Tommy is still an overwhelming cowboy in Sheridan mode. He pronounces oil “uhhh.” He chops off the tip of his pinky instead of taking care of the surgeries required to fix his hand. He’s an alcoholic, but thinks Michelob Ultra doesn’t count. As is the screenwriter’s habit, Sheridan can push this tendency to the absurd: when told he has a mouth on him, Tommy doesn’t just shoot back with, “That’s your wife’s favorite thing about me”—he also adds “other than my dick,” flipping the perpetrator off for good measure. But Thornton is an ideal delivery device for dense monologues about the fallacy of “clean” energy and sells an unbiased view of oil as a drug the world is addicted to of and lacking the infrastructure to wean itself from sustainably Per Sheridan’s plausibly deniable, politically ambiguous MO, Tommy is a no-nonsense pragmatist, not an ideologue: if anyone’s going to practice, it might as well be him.

“Landman” is far less effective as a family drama, partly because the female characters are so lacking in consistency. (In this, “Landman” repeats the mistakes of “Special Ops: Lioness,” albeit in a way less fatal to its core project.) As Tommy’s flirtatious ex-wife Angelica, Ali Larter gets to slurp one-liners and sport flashy outfits, but after the five episodes delivered to critics, the character remains largely the emotionally erratic, gold-digging sexpot she’s introduced as. Their daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) is basically Angelica’s mini-me, with an extra longing fixation on her teenage sexuality. In a shocking comedown from her career-best work in “The Substance,” poor Demi Moore gets a paltry handful of lines as Monty’s wife Cami. Presumably, the back half of the season will reveal why “Landman” bothered with an actress of Moore’s caliber for the role, but for now, her casting remains a mystery.

This deficit also extends to Tommy’s professional sphere. (A bulldog of a lawyer assigned to investigate an accident at the site has Beth Dutton’s aggression and is as one-note as Kelly Reilly’s “Yellowstone” anti-heroine.) But for the show’s purposes, it’s most damaging to the attempts at cultivating the Norris family as a center of gravity to complement Tommy’s job. “Patten,” as most locals call the fields, is where “Landman” really wants to be — though given the ubiquity of the Spanish-speaking workers, it’s disappointing that the show doesn’t make any of them a proper co-leader, or even giving much of their dialogue subtitles. The closest we get is Michael Peña’s Armando, a sexist bully who torments his colleague Cooper.

“Landman” has glaring gaps, and some of the incoherence that characterizes a television empire with many offshoots and a single writer. But these weak points are constantly offset by an evocative sense of place that hasn’t been replicated by television in this corner of the country since “Friday Night Lights.” (That series’ inspiration, the city of Odessa, is a frequently name-dropped location in “Landman.”) Even if the plot doesn’t quite come together in the season’s first half, a well-constructed setting can buy a lot of time.

The first two episodes of “Landman” are now streaming on Paramount+, with the remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays.