Landman Series Review Paramount+: A Journey Inside Oil and America That Never Changes!
Landman Series Review Paramount+: A Journey Inside Oil and America That Never Changes! - Filmyhype
Director: Taylor Sheridan, Christian Wallace
Date Created: 2024-11-21 16:45
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Landman Series Review Paramount+: Landman is the new, ambitious TV series created by Taylor Sheridan, someone who those who read us and love neo-westerns know very well. The former Texan cowboy, who has been the initiator of a rediscovery of the American Frontier on the small and big screen for about ten years, returns with a series where the infamous oil reigns supreme, but above all the family dimensions. The final result is atypical, but not without interesting ideas. Yellowstone. 1923. 1883. Mayor of Kingstown, Special Ops: Lioness. Tulsa King. Lawmen: Bass Reeves. This is not a random list of titles, but all of Taylor Sheridan’s productions for Paramount+, which has found its home in streaming and serialization after distinguishing itself in cinema.
Not only that: it has remembered a fundamental segment of the public for advertisers that progressive America seemed to have “forgotten”, namely straight-cis white males, and often Republicans. It may seem silly but even by targeting so specifically you can create your own “empire”, also because sometimes you can expand it with characters and storylines more open to modernity. We can also add Landman, a new series available with a weekly appointment on the platform. In this case, the series remains in that specific audience range. And perhaps a little too much.
Landman Series Review Paramount+: The Story Plot
“Landman” is a series that could certainly leave a bitter taste in the mouth of those who loved Taylor Sheridan’s strong-colored stories like “1883”, “1923”, “Yellowstone” and even the recent “Special Ops: Lioness”. Less action, less testosterone, and less pure opposition in this new odyssey in the plains of West Texas, where oil in the late 1800s made cowboys and ranches disappear, replacing them with drills, workers, and pipelines. Among the veterans of that profession, specialized in solving problems of all kinds, there is Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) who first manages to reach an agreement with a drug cartel, and then moves on to re-establish extraction in the most run-down deposits that belong to Monty Miller (Jon Hamm). Miller is one of the most important oilmen in the United States, married to Cami (Demi Moore), and like all his peers, he is dealing with a general hostility towards oil on the part of politicians and public opinion, increasingly inclined towards a green transition.
Norris also has his hands full with his ex-wife Angela (Ali Larter) and daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph), both busier getting drunk or making him uncomfortable than anything else. His eldest son Cooper (Jacob Lofland) dropped out of college to pursue his dream, even at the cost of risking his life as a simple worker at the beginning. As if that weren’t enough, Tommy also has to put up with the invasive Rebecca (Kayla Wallace), the lawyer Miller has put on his back to resolve the tide of disputes that oil always brings with it. “Landman” has as its first characteristic, compared to any other work by Tylor Sheridan, a substantial absence of real opposition or even just an adversary. What we are given here is instead the daily toil related to those wells, it is a journey inside the all-encompassing oil supply chain, which spares no aspect or angle for the viewer. Especially interesting is how Sheridan in “Landman” shows us the desperate reality of the workers, almost all Latinos, who risk dying at any moment.
Landman Series Review Paramount+ and Analysis
Where “Landman” can be divisive is in Taylor Sheridan’s vision of the oil industry, which is typically American, one might say, and which he praises from the first to the last minute. It’s not the first time that Sheridan has shown off a limited vision typical of the rest of a certain America, the one that still today cultivates the idea of an immobility connected to a Frontier tradition, which means that in places like Texas, a verbal agreement has legal recognition, or that private property is a God to be defended beyond all limits. The only law that “Landman” puts before us is that made of will, ambition, and personal decision, which then finds total realization also in the characters. Billy Bob Thornton is simply adorable in the role of this “jack of all trades” who goes through all sorts of things, an ex-alcoholic, armed with a cynically disenchanted sense of humor. The realistic and very human gaze with which Sheridan describes the degrading and backward reality of the working class compensates for the limitations of his female world.
Even more than in his other series, in “Landman” women are divided into two categories: babes and damsels to be saved. Larter and Randolph are two sexy and unbearable Barbies, a cougar and a cheerleader always with graces in the wind, who seem to have emerged from an all-male program of the 80s. A little better with Wallace, who obviously cannot help but bring with her an alpha woman sex appeal that Sheridan has now made a repetitive constant. But in his world everyone is like that, whoever has a shred of sensitivity or fragility, like Lofland’s Cooper, is not necessarily good enough for him. Cloaked in an irony that until now Sheridan had used much more sparingly, “Landman” does not have the epic of “Yellowstone”, it is not faithful to the genre like other series and films by Sheridan, and yet it works, it knows how to make us bond with the characters and surprise us with their interactions. Of course, a greater variety of vision and thought wouldn’t hurt him, nor would realizing that perhaps the world doesn’t begin and end where men wear stetsons.
We could define Landman as the series “for the man who never has to ask” as an old commercial used to say. This is because the initial characterization of the characters shows the side (consistent) with the current events and history of Texas: a certain type of mentality of the relationship between men and women, even where they try to modernize it. A certain type of “pack rules” like the team of extractors in which Cooper throws himself headlong to learn the trade from the bottom. In this type of male representation, Jon Hamm could not be missing, the former Don Draper of Mad Men who was able to bring all the facets of masculinity to the stage, and he does it once again, after Fargo, alongside Demi Moore, a wife and mother who must manage an empire and her own economic security in her own way.
The relationships between these protagonists are long-standing and show an evolution made of rivalries and envies, of the need to mark their territory, and of fights to the last drop of the so-called “black gold”. Perhaps a more successful Territory, or perhaps not, if we consider that it delimits itself, at least from the first episodes seen, to its target audience. Without leaving room for the curiosity of others, as Lioness was able to do to cite the most recent example, also Yellowstone created a great modern family saga and at the same time from another time. By now, the big names in Hollywood who “lend themselves” to seriality are no longer a sensational novelty and this also applies to Taylor Sheridan’s TV series. Among the interpreters who embellish the story, we find Michael Peña and Andy Garcia, as well as some returns from the showrunner’s stable like James Jordan.
Landman Series Review Paramount+: The Last Words
The result is a product that is certainly technically impeccable – a direction that exploits the Texas panoramas and photography that starts from the red and black – but that aims too directly at the target of the world it tells, forgetting everything else. Landman is a series made in the image and likeness of Taylor Sheridan’s fans. This is not necessarily a bad thing and perhaps in the current bulimic offer it manages to find its own space by aiming at a specific audience. However, it is also true that, at least from the first episodes seen, it fails to look beyond its nose as other recent products have been able to do. One above all: Lioness. It remains a title not to be missed for fans of the prolific showrunner, for sure.
Stars: Billy Bob Thornton, Ali Larter, Jon Hamm
Creators: Taylor Sheridan, Christian Wallace
Streaming Platform: Paramount+
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars)
