Recap of episode 1 of Landman
Taylor Sheridan wrote his latest television series, Husbandmanspecifically for Billy Bob Thornton. “I’m going to write it in your voice,” said the Yellowstone said the creator, according to Thornton. The actor revealed in a Q&A after the premiere that he couldn’t believe Sheridan until he finally received the script. “I read it,” Thornton recalled, “and I said, ‘Boy, you got my voice, didn’t you?'”
In Husbandman (which debuted its first episodes today)Thornton plays Tommy Norris, a middleman for a Texas oil company. For fans of Sheridan’s work, Tommy is very similar to Jeremy Renner’s character Mayor of Kingstown. Instead of making deals between Michigan prisons and the gangs outside the prison walls, Tommy negotiates with the workers in the field on behalf of the oil company. He is a problem solver. Tommy Norris is also a loudmouth, a self-proclaimed divorced alcoholic, and yes, a character clearly written with Billy Bob in mind.
When Husbandman’s pilot episode begins, Tommy doesn’t care that he’s being held captive by a Mexican cartel. Sheridan’s new favorite TV enemy kidnapped our Husbandman, placed a bag over his head and tied him to a chair in the middle of nowhere. Even with a gun pointed at his head, the first Tombstone actor threatens the cartel that the oil company will “pick them up like a piñata” if their deal goes wrong. He negotiates to save his life. Oil is a drug, just like what they push across the border. “You sell a product that your customers depend on,” he tells him. ‘It’s the same. Ours is just bigger.”
Tommy monologues while driving back home, which takes some getting used to. There is a lot of of entering Husbandman. “The oil and gas industry makes $3 billion a day in pure profit,” he explains. ‘It is the seventh largest industry in the world, ahead of food production, car production and mining, and – with a value of $1.4 trillion – the pharmaceutical industry is not even in the top ten. The above-mentioned oil and gas industries are completely dependent on oil and gas. That’s the size of this thing, and it’s only going to get bigger.”
It cannot be understated how bad all that is for the country. Finite resources like oil and gas are helping to destroy the planet’s climate at an alarming rate, but the earnings of the oil industry remain largely untouched. Husbandman. That’s probably for the best. As hard as it is to ignore, the facts of the case are not important to them Husbandman’s story. Tommy is just a man trying to find his place in a system of chaos. In Texas this is how it is. So Tommy’s job is to secure the lease for the land in the oil company’s name and then make sure all the workers do their jobs. “The first part is simple,” he says. “It’s the second part that could get you killed.”
Working in the oil field is a dangerous job. Most of the company’s employees are ex-convicts. They pay oil workers $180,000 a year to smash old wrenches against pipes that hopefully won’t blow up in their faces. Every time an OSHA worker sets foot in Texas, it’s a real day. Still, Husbandman is not The Wages of fear. There’s no time to really debate the ethics of all this. In fact, the company is paying Tommy to make sure this never ends up in the media. Keep the oil flowing and the workers happy.
Tommy’s autonomy allows him to act like one of Sheridan’s capitalist cowboys of the 21st century. He vacillates between the 1 percent lawyer and a Texas layman when the situation suits him best. His boss, Texas oil titan Monty Miller (Jon Hamm), is equally apolitical in his view of the American oil sector. It’s just the way he made his fortune, just like anyone else.
Who else is playing? Husbandman?
The rest of the supporting cast is largely all directly related to Tommy. His twenty-year-old son Cooper (Jacob Lofland) starts his first day at the oil field. Ainsley (Michelle Randolph), his 17-year-old daughter, is played by an actress who is already ten years older than 17. She also played Jack Dutton’s fiancée in 1923. Now she’s a teenager discovering life while dating football prospect Dakota Loving (Drake Rodger). He’s handy – and a walking red flag. When Tommy forbids sex in his house, Dakota refuses to spend time with Ainsley when they are not in contact. So it looks like the guy won’t even survive the first episode.
Tommy also spends a lot of time dealing with his ex-wife, Angela (Ali Larter from Heroes), exclusively via FaceTime while he’s driving. James Jordan out Lioness is also in this show. He is a petroleum engineer named Dale, and one of Tommy’s roommates. A lawyer named Nate (Colm Feore from The Umbrella Academy) also lives with him. They hang out in the kitchen and shoot something with old Husbandman before he goes to work.
What does the Farmer do?
As is the case with Lioness season 2 – another Sheridan series currently airing on Paramount+ – the Yellowstone Creator refuses to let the plot develop naturally. Husbandman goes full throttle. Without warning, two smugglers attempt to quickly transport a ton of cocaine from a van to a small plane, as a huge truck speeds down the road toward them. The driver stands dead with his foot on the accelerator, causing him to crash into the plane and blowing the entire operation into the air. Dead bodies everywhere. Cocaine in the wind. A new problem that Landman must solve.
Tommy tells the local sheriff that the plane was stolen from their company weeks ago. Now Monty hires fancy lawyers to fly in from the city and explain how one of their planes ended up in pieces as part of a botched drug trafficking operation. Oh, and there’s also the dead guy from the truck. What was that all about?!
Meanwhile, the oil workers spend the day hazing Tommy’s son. It’s Cooper’s first day on the job and he’s extremely green. He could have finished college and gotten his degree in geology, but for some reason he stopped working in the oil fields. Armando (Michael Peña), an oil crew member, picks him up at the crack of dawn with his friends.
They take him to a drive-thru coffee stand called Babes N’ Brew, where girls in pink bikinis hand out black coffee to crew members. Cooper orders a latte, so one of the girls calls him “an aristocrat.” The boys complain. “We don’t have time for a latte!” they shout as the cars behind them honk. “You just ordered the most complicated things.” Cooper will have to get used to regular coffee, even if he doesn’t like the taste. “It’s not about the taste, it’s about the fuel,” Armando’s uncle tells him. Then he throws Cooper’s latte out the window. I hope there are a million more oil metaphors on this show.
Later they fuck with him some more by making him climb a tall tower. The gang teaches him incorrect Spanish phrases and laughs as he struggles to eat spicy food. You’ve seen this kind of character before in Sheridan shows. He has a Jimmy van Yellowstone mood.
The next morning something goes wrong on one of the oil rigs. They are working on a pipe when Armando’s uncle realizes he has the wrong size tool. He tells Cooper to go back to the truck and pick it up. Cooper isn’t sure which one is right, but the whole machine explodes when he turns back around. It’s safe to assume everyone is dead. Cooper merely witnesses it, helplessly.
An oil rig explosion is a perfect opening for this Husbandman. It’s a simple problem for Tommy to reveal what he actually does for a living, and it’s incredibly devastating. I can’t say much about the whole plane crash fiasco because it feels like an insane issue to start the series. Hopefully, like Husbandman As we move on, we avoid the convoluted plots and get more into the heart of the show. Working on these oil rigs is hell on earth, and the Husbandman is the guardian of hell.