Man, does this new Taylor Sheridan drama hate women

No one comes to a Taylor Sheridan joint for nuanced female characters. The prolific writer-producer-director-actor traffics in broad (pun intended) tropes: The sexy-boozy viper (Yellowstone’s Beth Dutton); the sexy-stoic badass (Lioness’ Agent Joe); the sexy-stern matriarch (1923’s Cara Dutton), and so on.

Billy Bob Thornton in ‘Landman’.

Emerson Miller/Paramount+

Most of the time, Sheridan — who is credited as the sole writer of almost every episode of the shows listed above — compensates his clichéd female characters with just enough agency to drive some of the story, earn a few of the laughs, and occasionally even evolve as people.

The ladies of Landman (premiering Nov. 17) are not so lucky. The new Paramount+ drama — based on the Boomtown podcast and co-created by Sheridan and Christian Wallace — follows beleaguered oil-company fixer Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) as he bounces from crisis to crisis in the dusty West Texas patch. From the crews on the rigs to the suits in the C-suites, the oil biz is a male-dominated field, so it makes sense that Landman’s female characters reside mostly on the periphery. What’s distressing is that the women of Landman exist solely in the context of how they are perceived by Tommy and his cowboy cohorts — put simply, they are around to distract, annoy, titillate, entreat, or yell at the men.

“Oil and gas industry makes 3 billion dollars a day in pure profit,” intones Tommy in the series premiere. “Generates over 4.3 trillion dollars a year in revenue.” With such mind-boggling amounts of money on the line, Tommy spends his waking hours walking a legal and ethical tightrope to solve problems for his employer, M*Tex, an independent oil company owned by Monty Miller (Jon Hamm). Whether securing a land-lease deal with a Mexican drug cartel or negotiating settlements for women whose husbands were killed on the rig, Tommy has one goal: Keep the oil and the money flowing.

Given how dangerous the work of drilling can be, Tommy isn’t thrilled when his son, Cooper (Jacob Lofland), who has ambitions of being an oil baron one day, drops out of college to join a crew of M*Tex roughnecks. And he’s equally chagrined when his daughter, a bubbly, blond 17-year-old named Ainsely (Michelle Randolph), comes to crash at his rental house — which he shares with M*Tex attorney Nate (Colm Feore) and petroleum engineer Dale (James Jordan) — for spring break. Though Tommy’s ex-wife, Angela (Ail Larter), is remarried, she delights in blowing up Tommy’s phone, and her approach to co-parenting vacillates between sultry seduction and shrewish screaming.

Much like Yellowstone, Landman offers up a compelling depiction of the Wild West chaos and corporate/political subterfuge required to keep a vital American industry alive. M*Tex and its competitors operate under a shadow code of sorts, strategically evading laws because following them — like filing a police report when a drug cartel “borrows” one of the company’s jets — could send oil prices plunging and prompt an economic crisis.

“Every company has a version of Tommy. You cannot function without one,” says Monty, when his cautious attorney (Kristoffer Polaha) suggests he let Tommy take the fall for a deadly explosion at one of his drill sites. Tommy may not appear all that formidable — he’s a two-pack-a-day smoker whose dilapidated body looks like it’s held together with duct tape and spackle — but the man is relentless in his problem solving. After getting injured during an accident on site, Tommy opts to chop off the severed tip of his pinky with a pocketknife rather than wait for proper medical treatment. “I ain’t dickin’ around with 12 surgeries for a f—in’ year,” he tells the horrified ER doctor (Jake Olson).

Thornton manages to make that kind of exaggerated machismo immensely entertaining. In the field, Tommy faces his adversaries with wry exasperation and flinty defiance; at home, he deploys a smooth Southern baritone and good-old-boy charm to appease the pouty women in his life. It’s worth noting that none of the men in Landman, Tommy included, are portrayed as saints. They’re broken, sexist, slovenly, selfish, greedy, patronizing, ignorant, and more. But Tommy and his male peers are three-dimensional disasters; the women, by contrast, are wholly defined by their sex.

When Angela is not getting day drunk on margaritas or twerking in Tommy’s living room (“Just trying to keep the peach plump,” she quips), she’s climbing all over her ex-husband, whom she hopes to win back. Why? Hard to say. By his own admission, Tommy is “a divorced alcoholic with $500,000 in debt,” and his marriage to Angela was an unmitigated failure. Perhaps she’s just feeling insecure because she’s “aging out of cougar” — which is an actual line of dialogue Ali Larter is required to say. (Despite what’s on the page, the actress brings an affecting undercurrent of sadness to Angela’s sexy façade.) Ainsley, meanwhile, is devastated when her lug nut boyfriend (Drake Rodger) moves on to another cheerleader: “How could he? She’s a f—ing brunette!”

There is one woman in the M*Tex boys’ club: Rebecca Falcone (Kayla Wallace), a hard-charging young lawyer who holds her beautiful face in a “don’t mess with me” scowl. After a somewhat inauspicious first outing with Tommy — in which he mansplains the petroleum industry to her and then, I kid you not, saves her from a rattlesnake — Rebecca proves her mettle in the boardroom, dismantling the arguments of the sexist, alpha-male opposing counsel during a deposition. “Think they hired me ‘cause I’m pretty?” she snaps. “I charge $900 an hour, you asshole.”

It’s the type of you-go-girl triumph that only a man could script. Sheridan, who is credited as the sole writer on the first five episodes of Landman, may think the character of Rebecca serves as a counterweight to the show’s overt sexism, but he’s just indulging in another gross stereotype: The sexy, man-hating ball-buster.

Readers, we haven’t even made it to Demi Moore yet. The extremely famous actress, who plays Monty’s elegant wife, Cami, is featured prominently in ads for Landman. She does not, however, feature much at all in the first half of the season. (Paramount+ made five of the drama’s 10 episodes available for review.) When she is on screen, Cami does not make much of an impression: She swims laps in her backyard pool; she urges Monty to take his blood pressure medication; she cheers on her daughter (Dani Raen) at a track meet. In one episode, Cami wordlessly makes a smoothie in the background and then disappears. I’m not an optimist by nature, but I choose to believe Monty’s wife will have a burst of relevance in the back five episodes, because the alternative — that Sheridan cast an A-list actress as window-dressing — is simply too depressing.

Lest Mr. Sheridan think that I’m being too much of a scold, let me clarify: I’m not mad, sir, just disappointed. Landman’s pilot is fantastic, and I praised it as such. The underlying themes — including the world’s reliance on an industry that could destroy the planet — could not be timelier and more provocative. As the episodes progressed, however, and Sheridan proceeded to double, triple, and quadruple down with his tired takes on women, it was hard to maintain that same level of enthusiasm.

In another disheartening exchange, Tommy scoffs when Rebecca suggests that a sex worker at the local diner might not have had other options for employment. “She had a choice,” he sneers. “And she chose a shortcut, which is always the longest road.” Setting aside the harsh moralizing and startling lack of empathy, Tommy does have a point. Shortcuts — whether in life or in script-writing — often lead to subpar results. Grade: C-

The first two episodes of Landman premiere Sunday, Nov. 17, on Paramount+.