Dirty Work

Some towns, awash in money and power, need insiders to make sure it doesn’t all go haywire. It might be politely described as being a crisis manager, but we all know them as fixers.

A place like Washington D.C. needs them. Witness Olivia Pope (played by Kerry Washington) who helped President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn) win office in ABC’s Scandal. There’s also Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly) putting out the fires for Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) on Netflix’s House of Cards, guiding his crooked rise from House Whip to VP and then to President. Los Angeles needs them, too. Ray Donovan (Liev Schreiber) made sure Tinsel Town kept the movies and TV shows on track by covering up the misdeeds of producers and actors. Even a sleepier town like Albuquerque needs them, especially to protect the proceeds of the drug trade like Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) did working for both Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) and then for Walter White (Bryan Cranston) on Breaking Bad.

TV’s newest fixer, er, crisis manager? Billy Bob Thornton steps into this anti-hero role in Paramount+’s Landman. This time, it’s in hot, humid, present-day West Texas, and oil is the game in a modern-day gold rush. He plays Tommy Norris, often caught between billionaires seeking even more money and startup wildcatters looking for their first big well to explode. Norris works for Monty Miller (Jon Hamm). Like Norris, Miller is a former speculator, but he hit it big while Norris went bust. In Vanity Fair, Thornton recalled how creator Taylor Sheridan described his character: “Taylor said to me one day, ‘When you go over to this house and you think of where you live, you’re looking around and you think: I could have had this-but it went a different direction.’” Cue the rich-man, poor-man drama. Norris tends to billionaire Miller’s needs but also works with employees out in the field, checks the wells, deals with problematic rigs, and is always ready to meet with friends over a beer.

Landman is the latest drama from Sheridan’s copious string of productions that all started with the phenomenal cultural and ratings success of Yellowstone. And Thornton is the latest star to land in orbit inside Sheridan’s firmament: Kevin Costner in Yellowstone, Harrison Ford, and Helen Mirren in 1923, David Oyelowo in Lawmen: Bass Reeves, Sylvester Stallone in Tulsa King, Nicole Kidman in Special Ops: Lioness, Jeremy Renner in Mayor of Kingstown.

Thornton had already worked on another show for Sheridan, 1923, but for just one episode in 2021, as Marshall Jim Courtwright, who was based on a real-life Texas deputy sheriff. This new lead role for Thornton follows two other memorable TV characters, as the at first mysterious but then just plain evil Lorne Malvo in the first season of Fargo (2014), for which he was nominated for a lead actor Emmy, and then starring as the louche has-been lawyer Billy McBride for four seasons (2016-21) in David E. Kelley’s noirish legal drama Goliath. He won a Golden Globe for Best Actor for the first season. (Hollywood side note: Costner was in talks to play McBride in 2015 before Thornton was cast, which would have been Costner’s debut as the lead in a TV series. Instead, his debut came in 2018 as ranch patriarch John Dutton in Sheridan’s Yellowstone.)

Landman is based on a popular 2019 podcast called Boomtown that told stories set in the Permian Basin in Texas which is still a real-life frontier for oil exploration that has produced billions of barrels through traditional wells and fracking. Of course, when there is a boom, that could be soon followed by a bust. Like other Sheridan shows, that cycle could provide seasons worth of earth-shaking drama.

Landman, Series Premiere, Sunday, November 17, Paramount+