All the Pretty Koch Suckers |
Oil fields appear like a circuit board near Midland, Texas. Photograph Source: formulanone from Huntsville, United States – CC BY-SA 2.0
There’s a moment in Season 1 of Landman that crystallizes everything. The oil company’s shareholders gather in their boardroom, high above the West Texas dust and blood. Someone mentions the inevitable: we need to transition away from fossil fuels and move toward sustainable energy. There’s a flicker of acknowledgment around the table. Everyone nods. They know. Then, as if the words were never spoken, the conversation simply returns to extraction, production, and quarterly targets. The brief moment of clarity vanishes as if it never occurred. The episode isn’t a failure of imagination. The result is perfect knowledge paired with absolute paralysis—and it’s the most honest thing you’ll see on television about where we are as a civilization.
Landman, created by Taylor Sheridan and streaming on Paramount , stars Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris, a crisis manager (the “landman”) for a Texas oil company navigating the daily catastrophes of the patch—worker deaths, cartel violence, regulatory nightmares, and family dysfunction. Jon Hamm plays his CEO boss in Season 1, running the empire with ruthless efficiency until his death at season’s end. Demi Moore, playing his widow, inherits not just the company but the accumulated complications of her husband’s corner-cutting and crisis management. Though formidable in her own right, she finds herself dependent on Tommy to navigate the minefield her late husband left behind—a dynamic that reveals how even power at the top remains tethered to those who manage the violence of extraction on the ground.
Both Thornton and Moore, at the twilight of their careers, bring weathered authenticity to roles about people who’ve survived by compromise and can’t imagine another way to live. Season 2 introduces Sam Elliott as Tommy’s estranged father, living out his final days in a rest home after the death of Tommy’s mother—a woman neither man misses. Their reconciliation, pushed by Tommy’s wife, unfolds with the spare poetry Elliott brings to everything. In one sunset scene, father and son sit together, both confessing they’re “totally worn out emotionally.” It’s unclear whether they mean by each other, by oil, or by the whole exhausting project of American manhood—probably all three.
Ali Larter plays Tommy’s current wife, younger and eager to please in ways that become their form of extraction comedy. The ensemble includes strong repertory work throughout, including an oil manager perpetually distracted by Tommy’s daughter, Ainsley (played by Michelle Randolph, who understands exactly what power her underwear-clad presence wields in a man’s world built on desire and petroleum). The younger generation gets their own tragic education. Tommy’s son is in love with a Latina woman who wants something oil money can’t buy: simplicity, locality, mutual presence without ambition’s corrosion. When she inherits wealth, he faces the series’ central question in miniature: does he follow the money or stay with the love? It’s the same choice civilization faces in that boardroom—and we already know how that story ends.
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