There are few types of characters on television that can seem quite as exhausting as the one man who knows how to get things done on The Taylor Sheridan Show. From Kevin Costner Yellowstone by Jeremy Renner on Mayor of Kingstown – And now Billy Bob Thornton in Sheridan’s new drama Landman – These guys are always running from one crisis to another, all someone else’s fault, and no one seems to have the slightest idea how to solve it.
Every writer puts some of their own personality 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 became a one-man TV drama factory in the six years that followed. Yellowstone For the first time. Landman is the eighth installment of the Sheridan series to premiere during this period. With some shows, such as Tulsa KingHe will delegate responsibilities, but often prefers to do as much as possible himself. Although there is a brief period in Yellowstone Season 2, where Sheridan co-wrote episodes with others, the vast majority of the series is credited solely to him as a writer. This year alone, his name will be the only name on the scripts of 24 different TV shows, including Yellowstone, Landmanand lioness (formerly known as special operations: Lioness). He also periodically directs episodes of his shows, especially in the beginning, takes on other producer duties, and is constantly developing ideas for new series, whether or not they are put into the series. Yellowstone Universe or not.
Sheridan isn’t the first showrunner to hold tight to the reins of his series, and this year he’s not even close to setting a record. There was a TV season in which Aaron Sorkin wrote or co-wrote 36 different episodes Sports Night and West Wingand another where David E. Kelley wrote or co-wrote 47 Various episodes of practice and Ali MacPhail. Sheridan’s shows make the seasons shorter than what Sorkin, Kelly or Shonda Rhimes used to do, up to a point. However, he does a lot jobs at a lot of different shows at once, and his explanation for this in interviews sounds like something one of his leading men would say: At the end of the day, no one understands this area like Taylor Sheridan himself.
But as the person with the most control over the fictional lives of John Dutton and his companions, Sheridan is also perhaps best suited to recognize the limits of this individualistic approach to solving issues. Because his heroes are always overextended, their solutions often inadvertently lead to more disasters that, again, only they can fix. The more cowboy hats Taylor Sheridan tries to wear, the more shabby the final product becomes. Landman It often plays as if someone else asked ChatGPT to produce a Sheridan-style drama, or like Sheridan wrote rough rough rough drafts of each script, and simply ran out of time or energy to polish them into the versions he wanted people to see. Billy Bob Thornton’s sheer charisma and gab covers up some of the gaps in the material, but many of the plots and characters feel too weak, and others feel so retrograde as to be self-parody.
Like most of Sheridan’s work. Landman is a great 1980s prime-time TV series that wears the trappings of a contemporary anti-hero drama – the Dallas With swearing, more violence and nudity. We meet Tommy in a vulnerable place, being held at gunpoint by a drug cartel enforcer. They have a thorny issue to resolve: The cartel owns a piece of land outside of Midland, Texas
Related Content Midland’s sister city Odessa was the city’s hometown Friday Night Lights Thornton starred in the movie, and in one episode you see him at a game involving the Permian Panthers, the team he coached in the movie. The Landman Opening credits and theme song, meanwhile, shamelessly echo Friday Night Lights TV program. Emotions and level of execution vary greatly LandmanAny version of
National Liberation Forces
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From there, we are introduced to the rest of Tommy’s friends and family. His son Cooper (Jacob Lofland) dropped out of college to learn the oil business from the ground up, working on a drilling crew with veterans Luis (Emilio Rivera) and Armando (Michael Peña). His spoiled teenage daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) travels to spend the weekend at the McMansion that Tommy shares with lawyer Nathan (Colm Feore) and engineer Dale (James Jordan), and ends up staying there. Tommy’s work is frequently interrupted by FaceTime calls with his bitter ex-wife Angela (Ali Larter). With so many issues erupting – many literally – Monty is also forced to enlist an outside consultant in the form of Rebecca (Kayla Wallace), whose youth and awakened demeanor have her firmly on Tommy’s bad side.
Tommy is presented as a man who screwed up his life and career pretty well, and now acts as Monty’s fixer after being forced to give up his dreams of becoming an oil baron. He is $500,000 in debt, has long been estranged from both his children and Angela, and is an alcoholic who insists he can get away with drinking beer because it contains very little actual alcohol. But the show treats him as being right on every subject and in every circumstance. Even when he makes a mistake – like considering reconciling with Angela once she arrives in town – he realizes it’s wrong, and is powerless to resist it. Tommy always knowing the right answer leads to almost all of his interactions with the other characters being unbalanced, and only Thornton’s essential charm makes much of the material watchable despite this. Sheridan ends most of Tommy’s scenes by giving him a cue to show how smart he is, but they tend to be pretty weak, as when he hangs up on Angela by saying: “Enjoy the beach. Your breasts look great. Don’t get syphilis! Meanwhile, Hamm may not be in the show. Though he looks like he was bred in the lab to be at the forefront of Taylor Sheridan’s series about the changing American character, and the shrinking spaces of a certain type of man, Hamm instead descends into being a man in a suit who occasionally appears to be upset. While taking phone calls from Tommy about the latest mess in the oil fields. In one episode, Monty manages to provide a pencil sketch of Don Draper’s speech, about how we all need the oil industry even when 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 repeats its ideas a lot, perhaps because it doesn’t have much to say, perhaps because it just needs to fill time by any means necessary. (Episode 5 lasts 64 minutes for some reason, which includes a lengthy montage of Cooper mowing and weeding someone else’s lawn.)Jon Hamm and Demi Moore in
Landman
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Emerson Miller/Paramount+
But if Hamm barely does anything, Demi Moore doesn’t have anything to do like his wife Cami, whose only noteworthy scene in the early episodes was encouraging Monty to take his pills and exercise more regularly. Simply by virtue of being so weird, Cami turns out to be the least bad female character on the show. Every other woman is a combination of stupid, oversexed, angry, humorless, or loud. Many of Angela’s conversations with Tommy involve her yelling at him and alternately offering him sexual favors. Rebecca is a progressive rebuke who thinks she’s too good for these people and their business, and is very clearly ready to have her pants pulled down (perhaps figuratively, but perhaps literally) by Tommy. (When she objects to being referred to as “Mrs.” to the waiter, he responds sarcastically: “Oh, did I guess wrong? I’m sorry, sir.”)
The most effective material comes in Cooper’s interactions with Lewis and his crew, who emerge as real people rather than employees of the show’s plots, and who suggest that there is a compelling story to be told about the mechanics of blue-collar life in oil. A thriving city. But Rivera and Peña are written too early, the show quickly loses interest in the community, and Luis and Armando’s replacements are cartoon characters who are simply there to cause trouble for Cooper and set more fires for Tommy to put out. Trending StoriesTommy, Monty and others often talk about the dangers of working for a company that relies on a rapidly dwindling natural resource, for which they believe there is no realistic alternative. They will do everything they can to pump oil, and money, while they still can, the consequences will be damned. Perhaps Sheridan insists on doing much of the work himself because he worries that television work is similarly heading for extinction, and that it’s best to write as many episodes as possible while there are still places where he can do so. There’s an interesting raw material
Landman just like in almost everything Sheridan makes. But to get it out of the ground and flowing, Sheridan might want to stop trying to do it all himself. The first two episodes of
Landmine begins airing on November 17 on Paramount+, with additional episodes released weekly. I’ve seen the first five.