There’s a moment in Taylor Sheridan’s new drama “Landman” where the dust settles on a West Texas oil field, and all that remains are hard men, harder choices, and—at least according to the show’s critics—women who exist only in the shadow of both. If you’ve spent any time on Reddit or in the comment sections of recent reviews, you’ll know that “Landman” has ignited fierce debate—not about the price of oil or the moral cost of drilling, but about the cost of the show’s depiction of its female characters.
Sheridan, the prolific showrunner behind “Yellowstone,” “1883,” and “Wind River,” has never been lauded for nuanced portrayals of women. His archetypes are familiar: the sexy, boozy viper, the stoic badass, the matriarch with a backbone of steel. But “Landman,” which follows oil-company fixer Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) as he navigates the cutthroat world of West Texas drilling, seems to take these tropes to their most extreme. The women here—Tommy’s ex-wife Angela (Ali Larter), his daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph), and the ambitious attorney Rebecca Falcone (Kayla Wallace)—are rarely afforded the depth or agency that marks Sheridan’s best work.
Online, the backlash has been swift and pointed. Reddit threads bristle with dismay at the show’s “hyper-sexualization” of women, especially the 17-year-old Ainsley, whose frank sexual conversations with her father and scantily clad appearances have left viewers uncomfortable, if not outright appalled. “No girl would say that to her dad,” one commenter insists, while another laments the normalization of “leering glances” at a high schooler. Angela, meanwhile, vacillates between sultry seduction and shrewish screaming, her character seemingly defined by her relationship to Tommy and her fading allure.
Critics outside the message boards echo these concerns. Kristen Baldwin, writing for Entertainment Weekly, calls out Sheridan’s reliance on “broad tropes,” noting that while his female characters in other series have at least been given some agency, those in “Landman” are “wholly defined by their sex.” Angela’s lines—“aging out of cougar,” “just trying to keep the peach plump”—are cited as examples of dialogue that reduces women to objects of desire or ridicule. Rebecca Falcone, the young lawyer, is introduced with promise, but her moments of triumph (“I charge $900 an hour, you asshole”) feel scripted for a “you-go-girl” moment that rings hollow, written by a man who seems more interested in caricature than character.
The show’s co-creator, Christian Wallace, has defended these choices in interviews. “You can ask almost any West Texan if they know some loud, audacious, bold women, and you’ll almost certainly get a resounding yes,” he told Deadline, insisting that Angela and Ainsley reflect regional personalities. He argues that their “comedy and lightheartedness” bring levity to a show otherwise defined by men crushed by pipes or burned at oil wells. Yet, for many viewers, this defense falls short. The levity, they argue, is undercut by the lack of real agency or complexity, leaving the women as little more than foils for the men’s drama.
Billy Bob Thornton, for his part, has spoken about the “unexpected humor” in Tommy Norris’s world, and Ali Larter has tried to frame Angela as more than a cliché. In interviews, Larter suggests that Angela’s bravado masks deeper insecurities and sadness—a reading that, at times, she manages to bring to the screen despite the writing. Kayla Wallace, who plays Rebecca, has discussed the challenge of holding her own opposite Kelly Reilly’s Beth Dutton from “Yellowstone,” another of Sheridan’s famously thorny female creations. But even these efforts can’t fully compensate for the show’s structural issues.
It’s not just the women who are painted with broad strokes. The men of “Landman,” as Baldwin notes, are “broken, sexist, slovenly, selfish, greedy, patronizing, ignorant, and more.” But they are disasters in three dimensions—flawed, yes, but also complex and, at times, sympathetic. The women, by contrast, are disasters in one dimension, their motivations too often reduced to sex, status, or their relationship to the men around them.
The controversy has overshadowed much of what “Landman” does well. The show’s depiction of the oil business is compelling, with its Wild West chaos and corporate subterfuge. Tommy Norris is a fascinating antihero, and Thornton’s performance is reliably magnetic. The series is visually striking, capturing the dust, heat, and danger of the Texas oil patch with a cinematic eye. There are moments of genuine tension and moral ambiguity, particularly as Tommy walks the tightrope between legality and expediency.
But the question remains: can a show that fails so spectacularly in its portrayal of women truly succeed? Sheridan’s defenders argue that he writes what he knows—that the oil industry is, in fact, a male-dominated world, and that the women who orbit it are bound to be marginalized. Yet this realism, if that’s what it is, doesn’t absolve the show of its responsibility to offer more than stereotype and spectacle. “Landman” is not a documentary; it’s a drama, and drama thrives on complexity, on the capacity of its characters—male and female—to surprise, challenge, and evolve.
There is hope, perhaps, in the promise of future episodes. Demi Moore, cast as the elegant wife of oil magnate Monty Miller (Jon Hamm), is featured heavily in promotional materials but barely appears in the first half of the season. Her character, Cami, is given little to do beyond making smoothies and urging her husband to take his blood pressure medication. If Moore’s presence signals a coming shift, it may yet bring the depth and gravitas the show so desperately needs.
In the end, “Landman” is a story about power—who wields it, who suffers its consequences, and who is allowed to matter in its telling. Sheridan’s West Texas is a place of men, money, and moral compromise, but it need not be a place where women are mere decoration. The show’s defenders say that its women are “loud, audacious, bold.” The critics say they are “embarrassing, annoying, and distracting.” Both may be true, but neither is enough.
If “Landman” wants to be more than another entry in Sheridan’s ever-expanding universe—if it wants to matter, to endure, to say something real about the world it depicts—it will need to give its women more than punchlines and plot devices. It will need to give them stories of their own.
Until then, the dust will settle, and the debate will rage on.
