Maybe you miss Friday Night Lights, or maybe you understand Billy Bob Thornton is a gosh-darn national treasure. Maybe you’ve become hooked on writer-director Taylor Sheridan’s talent for creating romantic, tough-talking, occasionally retrograde, if highly entertaining American melodramas. Whatever your reasons, you really must check out Landman, the new Texas oil country drama debuting with two episodes on Paramount+ this Sunday. The cast is stacked (Thornton, Jon Hamm, Michael Peña, Demi Moore) and the Lone Star atmosphere (country music needle drops, a high school football game in episode one) is as thick as the crude these guys are pumping out of the ground. Landman is based on the hit Texas Monthly podcast Boomtown and collides roughnecks and drug gangs and Big Oil lawyers in a shamelessly escapist (and extremely timely) way. There’s simply no one like Thornton, who plays the company fixer at the center of the action to weary, good-ole-boy, expletive-laced perfection. His hand badly injured in episode two, he’s asked if he wants a doctor. His answer: “No, I want a cigarette and a Dr Pepper.” —TA
How to watch: Stream on Paramount+.
