2 out of 5

Created by: Taylor Sheridan

covers season 1

The first Taylor Sheridan show I watched was Mayor of Kingstown, which I possibly only viewed out of curiosity – let me see if I understand the appeal of this Yellowstone guy – and also out of a need to justify (to myself) my Paramount Plus subscription, beyond watching Star Trek and Turtles and Perry Mason.

For similar reasons, I have continued to watch Sheridan shows, still not really resolving the first part of the above qualifiers. I’m highly skeptical of the talent he pulls into these series, partially suspecting there’s some mental balancing done on behalf of the actors – I’ll get room to act; it’ll definitely up my star quotient; and maybe I can squeeze some decency out of the regressive politics and high school dialogue – and then also wondering / accepting that maybe I’m seeing biases from these same actors playing out in the selection of material which is totally in love with “classic” masculinity, 90s brand feminism where showing your tits and calling yourself a slut is empowerment, and a fine-line nigh-MAGAness of ra ra American values and capitalism and What Even Are Gender Pronouns? speeches.

…Perhaps I’ve done and answered my question about the appeal. (And called out my own biases and lack of impartiality here, fair enough.)

Backpedaling a bit, masculinity and showing your slutty tits are not inherently bad things; taking pride in America is not bad. The pronouns thing was maybe specific to Tulsa King, which was not written by Sheridan, but the very clear gender roles in any Sheridan production suggest how that stuff could’ve made the cut. Rather, the primary thing I take issue with with these shows, and that I keep watching to try to grasp, is that they’re… not very good. Characters are often defined by their frontmost qualities, and you’ll get some solve-it-all lead male and probably a tsundere in there, and shallow episode-by-episode escalations. But what Landman had me realizing, and doubling back to reflect on Yellowstone, is that the starting point for the Sheridan formula is a soap operas, and that’s a whole different playbook of plotting and dialoguing.

Unfortunately, somewhere during the creation of the post-Yellowstone Sheridanverse, there seemed to be the thought that these could be more than that base, and so we started getting soaps that tried to be takedowns of the class and incarceration system, or studies of American history, or dark crime comedies, or covert ops actioners, and the confusion that happens when lifting the limitations of a soap into other genres is that the inherent overplayed aspects of the soap get blown into grander proportions, soapier proportions which are a substitute for more layered writings on the above topics, like a Housewives episode lecturing on quantum physics.

With Landman, we’re adapting a podcast about the oil business so that Sheridan can parody / portray the life of a man in the titular role, Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton), working for M-Tex oil company, owned by our parody / portrayal oil tycoon (Jon Hamm) and his trophy wife (Demi Moore). Norris also has his trophy wife (Ali Larter) and short-shorts-wearing daughter (Michelle Randolph), and a wayward son, Cooper (Jacob Lofland), who’s trying to make his own way in the oil business, though working from the ground up as a “worm” on the pitch, physically setting up derricks with a crew.

The parody and portrayal duality is, ultimately, the failure of the show in my mind, as Sheridan never quite clarifies what we’re after: are we criticizing this lifestyle that’s fueled off the backs of underpaid workers, or praising its necessity and the mental toughness it takes to run it all from afar? Are we critical of environment destroying practices, or praising the man-made know-how thats modernized them? As a non-answer, Sheridan paints all the characters – Tommy, our perfect male lead, excepted – in supposed gray tones, where Angela (Larter) and Ainsley (Randolph) flaunt their sexualities and happily proclaim various ignorances, but are, y’know, tough and smart in their own ways. (“Strong female protagonists,” we might’ve called them a decade back.) Tommy, meanwhile, is no-nonsense and wisdom spittin’, an ex-drunk who knows he can handle light beer and manages to equally woo and piss off all the ladies with his natural charm, calm around billionaires and the cartel. He don’t care for money, but he recognizes its value, and so we get speeches about the oil companies faking goodness through windfarms, but also providing the power the people absolutely need. It can be a pretty persuasive speech, especially as delivered by Thornton, and especially if you’re not bothered to see if any of his “facts” hold up. Charitably, we might say these are just accurate representations of how these people might act – and that’s probably true, and people like Angela certainly exist – but then what, exactly, is the point? What are we taking from this? Just being a soap opera would be fine; there’s some sincerely good drama in here, carried really well by the actors, maybe especially Larter and Randolph and Paulina Chavez, Cooper’s beau. But instead, there’s always this extra suggestion of importance given to any given interaction, diving into the admittedly interesting minutiae of running an oil company, then speechifying all of it and adding Americana music and Texas landscape shots and a Jerry Jones cameo and lots of talk of family something or other, because the show is maybe trying to tell us that greed, on the whole, is good, as long as you’re working hard. The speechifying ultimately comes across as hollow – repeating internet tirades with dolled up language, or trying to straw man some faux both-sidesism – which only highlights the one-dimensionality of the characters, despite the actors’ best intention.

As though realizing this lacking heart, Taylor then overplots the extraneous drama. This is where the soap opera bit is played up at least: as I think these storylines about Angela trying to adjust to Texas life, and Ainsley trying to find a steady boyfriend, and Cooper shacking up with an ex-coworker’s wife, are all acceptable and entertaining distractions, until, again, they get coded with more importance than they have. On the other hand, if the show did stick with its more difficult subject matters – the drastic difference between the suits in the city and those stuck in the dirt, trying to do their bid and get out with some cash – there’s certainly a valuable, and potentially affecting, drama there as well. But, as presented, this stuff has been prettied up and rather oversimplified, as moderately raged about above.

I set my bias out near the start, though. These shows are… not for me. But I do find Yellowstone (and Mayor of Kingstown) and especially noxious breed of the Sheridan brand, though, as they aim to be about something, and employ good actors and some isolated strong concepts towards that, but then brush it all with the same overblown coat of paint that’s worked for Sheridan’s mainline soap.