There’s a scene in Taylor Sheridan’s new oil-and-grit drama, Landman, that makes your skin crawl. It’s a moment that perfectly crystallizes the most troubling critique of the man who has become the de facto poet laureate of the American frontier. Ainsley (Michelle Randolph), the 17-year-old daughter of a crisis manager, is talking to her father, Tommy (Billy Bob Thornton). She describes, with a chillingly casual air, the precise sexual acts she permits her boyfriend to perform on her body.1 “That’s just so weirdly gross to say to your dad,” one viewer wrote online.1 Another was more blunt: “The writing for the women is atrocious”.1
This isn’t just a dust-up over a single line of dialogue. For Sheridan—the architect of a television empire built on rugged authenticity and a deep, often brilliant, interrogation of modern masculinity—this scene feels less like a misstep and more like a symptom.3 As his dominion of shows like
Yellowstone, 1883, and Mayor of Kingstown expands, a pointed question grows louder: Does Taylor Sheridan, arguably the most successful storyteller in America today, have a “woman problem”?
In Landman, the evidence is hard to ignore. From professional critics to the digital town squares of Reddit, the most consistent condemnation of the show is aimed squarely at its female characters.5 They are, by wide consensus, “two-dimensional” 1, “full of stereotypes and negative tropes” 6, and saddled with dialogue that often lands with a thud.1
The show presents a veritable gallery of grievances. Beyond Ainsley, whose character seems written with a perpetual leering gaze, there’s her mother, Angela (Ali Larter), a self-described “trophy wife” and “industrial-grade trouble magnet” whose motivations rarely venture beyond the superficial.7 Then there’s the corporate lawyer, Rebecca (Kayla Wallace), a one-note aggressor that many viewers dismiss as a weak echo of
Yellowstone’s formidable Beth Dutton.6 One critic noted sharply that the only featured woman not overtly sexualized is Rebecca, and that’s only because “almost every scene where she appears forces her to explain how seriously everyone should take her”—a narrative choice that undercuts her authority from the start.7
This isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. Across the Sheridan-verse, this pattern repeats. Fans have pointed out the lazy recycling of signature lines, like when Rebecca threatens to “hang your f**king law degrees above my toilet,” a near-verbatim lift from a famous Beth Dutton takedown.8 This repetition reinforces the sense that Sheridan’s idea of a “strong” woman is often confined to a single, belligerent, emotionally volatile template.
To dismiss this as simply “bad writing,” however, may be to miss the point. Some argue that these characters, particularly the chaotic mother-daughter duo in Landman, serve as a necessary, if clumsy, tonal counterbalance to the grim, tragedy-laden world of the men.10 It’s a worldview that aligns with the broader critique that the show caters to a “MAGA worldview”—a cultural stance that champions traditional industry and holds more conservative, or as critics would say, regressive, views on gender roles.7
From this perspective, the messy family drama isn’t a narrative flaw but a deliberate thematic device. It highlights the central paradox of Tommy Norris: he is a supremely competent fixer in the hyper-masculine world of the oil fields, yet he is utterly powerless against the whims of his ex-wife and daughter at home.12 It’s a recurring Sheridan theme: the modern cowboy can tame the frontier, but he’s lost in the complexities of the modern family.
Ultimately, the issue may trace back to Sheridan himself and his famously solitary creative process. He proudly serves as the sole writer on his shows, having voiced a deep aversion to collaborative writers’ rooms.13 “I am going to tell my stories my way,” he told
The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s no compromising”.15
This authorial command is both his greatest strength and his most significant blind spot. It produces the unfiltered, singular vision that his massive audience finds so raw and authentic.13 But this “isolation in the writing process” also means there are no checks, no balances, and no dissenting voices.15 When one creator wields that much power, his personal biases and repetitive tics can make it to the screen unchallenged. As one critic put it, Sheridan has developed a “God Complex that is shrouding his work”.15
So, Taylor Sheridan’s “woman problem” may not stem from active misogyny, but from the inevitable byproduct of his creative fiefdom. In his universe, female characters too often exist not as individuals, but as functions of their male protagonists’ journeys. They are the burdens to be carried, the chaos to be managed, the aggressors who mimic male power. They are rarely afforded the same interiority or complex motivations as the men whose stories they serve.
As Sheridan’s empire continues its unprecedented expansion, shaping a generation’s vision of the American West, the narrowness of that vision becomes a more glaring flaw. The real problem isn’t what Ainsley Norris says to her father. It’s whether, in Taylor Sheridan’s world, she and the women like her are ever allowed to say anything else.
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