The most controversial scene in Landman Season 1 wasn't a rig explosion or cartel shootout. It was Jon Hamm delivering a monologue about wind turbines.
"A wind turbine will never pay for itself in energy creation," oil baron Monty Miller declares in Episode 2, claiming the machines can't offset their carbon footprint in 20 years. The clip went viral. Right-wing commentators shared it thousands of times. And peer-reviewed research says it's spectacularly wrong—most turbines pay back their energy cost in months, often under a year.
Ten days before Season 2 premieres on November 16, that scene crystallizes everything Landman gets right and wrong. Taylor Sheridan's Paramount+ drama became the platform's most-watched original ever—35 million global viewers for Season 1—by building a world that feels brutally authentic. Then it puts demonstrable falsehoods in its characters' mouths and lets them stand unchallenged.
The show works because it shouldn't. Critics call it misogynistic. Industry insiders catalog its technical errors. Fact-checkers debunk its energy talking points. None of that stopped 14.9 million people from watching in the first four weeks, making it a bigger phenomenon than Yellowstone's rocky first season.
The authenticity paradox
Co-creator Christian Wallace built the series from his Boomtown podcast, compositing real stories from West Texas oil patches. Those bikini barista stands near remote drill sites? Real. The catastrophic blowouts and H2S exposures? Pulled from actual incidents. Texas Tech petroleum engineers ran the cast through "oilfield 101" to nail the procedural details.
Then the show takes those authentic foundations and builds myth on top. A "landman" in reality researches mineral rights and negotiates leases—desk work, contracts, title searches. Tommy Norris, Billy Bob Thornton's fixer protagonist, handles cartel negotiations, covers up deaths, and orchestrates damage control. The job title is real. The job description is frontier fantasy.
Industry professionals flag the gaps everywhere. Characters misuse "blowout" when they mean kick or well control incident. Roughnecks operate valves and pipe wrenches in ways that would get them fired. Fall arrest systems fail in scenarios where real equipment wouldn't. The terminology sounds right until someone who actually works a rig hears it.
That gap between feel and fact defines the show's appeal. Sheridan stages the oil industry the way it sees itself—rugged, dangerous, essential, besieged by coastal elites and green energy advocates who don't understand what keeps the lights on. When Monty Miller rails against renewables, he's not making an argument. He's performing an identity.
The wind turbine speech isn't an outlier. It's the thesis.
The women problem
Multiple critics used the same phrase: Landman "hates women." The evidence piles up fast. Ex-wife Angela (Ali Larter) exists to sunbathe topless, seduce her lawyer, and deliver man-camp gossip. Daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph, 27, playing 17) serves as airport eye candy in crop tops. Demi Moore's Cami Miller barely registers in early episodes despite being married to the show's second lead.
Larter pushed back hard. She told Entertainment Weekly she embraces Angela's sexualization, that the character has agency and complexity beyond her body. "Objectify me," she said, framing it as power rather than reduction.
That defense doesn't resolve the tension. The show gives Angela sharp dialogue and genuine emotion in the family dinner scenes that serve as the series' emotional anchor. Then it cuts to her doing splits in a bikini while Tommy watches through binoculars. Both things can be true—the character can have dimension and still be framed through the male gaze—but only one reads on screen to critics tired of Sheridan's recurring patterns.
The misogyny critique dogs all his work. But Landman makes it harder to dismiss because the show is so explicitly about masculinity in crisis. Tommy's son Cooper apprentices on rigs to prove himself. His boss Monty performs toughness to mask his corporate anxieties. The roughnecks police each other's manhood constantly. Women in this world exist to validate, service, or complicate that masculine project.
Sheridan defenders argue he's showing the culture, not endorsing it. Critics counter that showing without comment is endorsement when your protagonist gets to speechify unchallenged for five-minute monologues about everything else.
Why it works anyway
Landman has a 78% Rotten Tomatoes score. Yellowstone's first season got 58%. The difference is Billy Bob Thornton, who makes Tommy Norris utterly watchable even when the writing fails him. He delivers Sheridan's polemical dialogue with a lived-in weariness that suggests the character knows he's performing. The exhaustion in his eyes cuts the mythmaking just enough to let you enjoy it ironically.
The show also moves. Episodes clock in tight, scenes crackle, violence erupts without warning. Sheridan learned from his Yellowstone pacing problems. Landman doesn't meander. When a rig explodes or a cartel ambush unfolds, the action is clean and brutal. The show trusts its hooks.
And the family dinners—where Tommy, Angela, Cooper, and Ainsley gather despite their dysfunction—give the series an emotional core that grounds all the testosterone and explosions. Those scenes work because they're written as moments, not thesis statements. Nobody's performing. They're just trying to stay connected across the wreckage of their relationships.
The ratings prove viewers will tolerate a lot of ideology and technical sloppiness when the fundamentals click. Paramount+ saw Season 1's numbers and fast-tracked Season 2 into production so aggressively that filming wrapped in Fort Worth months ago. That cadence is unusual. It also signals confidence.
What Season 2 needs to fix
The energy misinformation matters beyond fact-checking pedantry. When a show positions itself as authentic—when it brings in technical consultants and bases scenes on real incidents—it asks to be held to a factual standard. Letting Monty's wind turbine speech stand without challenge isn't dramatic license. It's choosing sides in a live political debate and pretending not to.
Season 2 could complicate that. Give the engineers and geologists dialogue that pushes back. Show renewables as competition rather than straw men. Let someone who isn't a villain make the climate case without immediately undercutting them. The show doesn't have to abandon its pro-industry stance to acknowledge complexity.
The gender representation needs sharper writing, not just better intentions. Angela's agency can't just be told in interviews—it has to be staged. Give Cami Miller something to do beyond reacting to Monty. Let Ainsley exist for reasons other than her body. These fixes don't require abandoning Sheridan's aesthetic. They require expanding who gets to be fully human inside it.
And the show should lean into what it does best: procedural intrigue. The mechanics of deal-making, lease negotiation, and title research that real landmen do offer rich dramatic territory. Tommy solving problems with contracts and strategy instead of just crisis management would differentiate the show from Sheridan's other tough-guy sagas.
The Sheridan Industrial Complex
Landman succeeds because Taylor Sheridan figured out how to make prestige TV for audiences who distrust prestige TV. His shows look expensive and feel epic, but they don't lecture. They validate a worldview that mainstream culture often dismisses—that resource extraction is noble work, that tradition deserves respect, that coastal elites don't understand heartland values.
That positioning makes him critic-proof. Bad reviews don't dent his audience because his audience already distrusts critics. The controversies amplify rather than diminish interest. Every "Landman hates women" headline just confirms to his fans that Hollywood doesn't get it.
Season 2 drops November 16 with that momentum secured. Paramount+ already renewed the show, signaling a long runway ahead. The question isn't whether it will be a hit—Season 1 settled that. The question is whether Sheridan will use that freedom to deepen the show's complexity or double down on the myths his audience already believes.
Ten days out, the smart money is on doubling down. But Billy Bob Thornton's exhausted eyes suggest the show knows exactly what it's doing. Whether that's cynical or sophisticated depends on how much credit you give the people watching.