‘Landman’ Season 2 Review: Billy Bob Thornton Anchors a Tale of Oil and Ruin

There are two shows awkwardly coexisting inside Landman, almost as if they were designed for different audiences and different genres. The first —and easily the more compelling— is a corporate drama with shades of thriller, crime, and back-room intrigue set in the world of West Texas oil and gas. In that show, Billy Bob Thornton shines as Tommy Norris, a kind of all-purpose fixer in the oil patch, a man who works for one of the big operators and oversees the messy day-to-day of drilling, production, and keeping wells profitable. The other show orbiting around that one follows Tommy’s messy family life, especially his on-again/off-again ex-wife and his kids. And there, aside from a few scattered exceptions, the series shifts into a comedic tone that rarely locks in with the rest.

The dominant register, though, is the financial-and-criminal drama. At the end of Season 1 (SPOILERS FOR SEASON 1), Monty Miller (Jon Hamm) is dead, and his company has passed to his widow, Cami —a character Demi Moore mostly played on the margins until now. Cami is tough, confident, and determined to keep the company afloat despite her grief. The problem is she has very little idea how to run an operator in the Permian Basin, and even less about the financial disasters and suspicious numbers her late husband left behind. That’s where Tommy steps in, carrying the company on his back, leaning on both his deep field knowledge and his more ruthless side when it comes to negotiations.

Tommy’s son Cooper (Jacob Lofland), meanwhile, after crashing through multiple mistakes, accidents, and close calls last season, seems to have stumbled into a stroke of luck: a set of wells he invested in start paying out unusually fast. But nothing is ever that easy. The windfall creates friction with his girlfriend Ariana (Paulina Chávez), and drags him into a potentially ugly situation involving Galino (Andy García), a billionaire with cartel ties who also has a decidedly unhealthy connection to Tommy.

The third narrative leg in Landman is the lightest and most problematic. It revolves around Tommy’s ex-wife Angela (Ali Larter), barging back into his life with her usual intensity, and their younger daughter, Ainsley (Michelle Randolph), portrayed as a stereotypical “ditzy blonde” —a college cheerleader whose world revolves around her squad, her looks, and a rather debatable command of English. Angela’s volatility and Ainsley’s exasperating shallowness are clearly meant as comic relief —a duo of clichés— but most of their scenes land closer to secondhand embarrassment.

There are moments when Angela’s presence actually generates something useful —a big gathering of the main characters at the end of Episode 3, a humorous standoff with local authorities in Episode 2— but for the most part, you could fast-forward through their subplots and miss nothing of consequence. Larter gives everything she has, but there’s only so much an actor can do when the script hands over a pile of inanities. As for Ainsley, outside of chanting her college team’s fight songs, very little of what she says comes out coherent or memorable. Tommy’s look of irritation whenever they’re around mirrors exactly what the audience is feeling.

Elsewhere, Landman works quite well as an “oil-patch thriller,” weaving together sketchy business deals, suspicious flows of money, legal trouble, and the even darker corners of that world: cartel entanglements, hydrogen-sulfide contamination, and all the dangerous working conditions that come with drilling and fracking. It’s not a series particularly interested in unpacking the global consequences of oil extraction —this is, after all, a Taylor Sheridan project, pitched to an audience that prefers its stories, and often its politics, on the traditional-to-conservative side— but if you set aside environmental concerns, the show immerses you in the day-to-day chaos of a multi-billion-dollar industry.

The show also has other strengths. The depiction of West Texas oil country feels vivid: the archetypal characters, the honky-tonks, the pricey steakhouses, the local codes of conduct. Sam Elliott shows up as Tommy’s father, and even in limited screen time, his presence is an immediate asset. Another standout is Kayla Wallace as attorney Rebecca Falcone, who steals nearly every scene she litigates and provides the show’s strongest female role alongside Moore. And the rest of the burden falls on Billy Bob Thornton —a seasoned, slightly cynical company man who always seems to know how to handle the job, even if at home he’s hopelessly out of his depth. And to be fair, the audience is right there with him.