LANDMAN, Season Two: Inheritance and the Cost of “Wildcatting”

Taylor Sheridan and Christian Wallace, creators 

Landman

Paramount+ / 2024-present / TV-MA

Reviewed by Don Michael Paul / April 2026

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Landman tells you what it believes in the first few minutes. Since its Paramount+ debut on November 17, 2024, Texas natives Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone, Hell or High Water) and Christian Wallace have doubled down on that worldview with zero interest in smoothing the edges. Men are men. Women are women. Oil is king.

The Permian Basin, “The Patch,” isn’t just a setting. It’s fate: pumpjacks still nodding along after the West Texas sun melts into the endless horizon.

Landman arrived with controversy. Some critics bristled at its unapologetic masculinity. Others praised its refusal to soften hard truths. Nearly everyone agreed on one thing: this wasn’t another sanitized prestige show. It was something dustier, meaner, and more emotionally direct.

For newcomers, here’s the premise in a nutshell: Billy Bob Thornton plays Tommy Norris, a landman who lives on the front lines of the oil business: leases, lawsuits, deaths on the job, cartel pressure, labor trouble, and the constant threat that one wrong move turns your day into a crater. The show doesn’t just depict the oil business; it inhabits the culture around it: man camps sprouting overnight, highways thick with company trucks, drive-through coffee stands staffed by half-dressed women selling caffeine before sunrise, and cafés like The Patch, pure Americana, where locals eat, argue, posture, dream, and quietly bleed. It’s world-building with scars and calluses. The setting is so specific it stops being a backdrop and becomes a character.

Roughnecks, rig-hands, outlaws, wildcatters, and drug runners populate this world, drawn to risk the way other people are drawn to comfort. Where else can an ex-felon legally make $185,000 a year? Landman never pretends these men are noble. It shows them as they are: reckless, loyal, brutal, funny, dangerous, greasy, sweaty, and indispensable. Without them, nothing moves. With them, everything teeters.

At the center of this sprawl stands Tommy, always on the move, always on his phone, always putting out fires. He’s not just a landman, he’s a hard man: hard to love, hard to kill, and hard not to like. He’s lived through booms and busts. He’s lost his fortune, owes a fortune, and keeps moving. Fueled by Marlboro Reds, Dr. Pepper, chicken-fried steak, and Michelob Ultra (which he insists, through his twisted brand of logic, doesn’t count because it has less alcohol than orange juice), Tommy treats addiction the same way he treats everything else: manage it, don’t cure it. His job is as simple and impossible as the conflict and plot: keep the rigs running and the money flowing while the bodies, lawsuits, and bad decisions pile up. Every day is triage with companies, crews, and criminals all tugging on the same rope, and Tommy stuck in the middle, trying not to get pulled apart. His cigarettes are the only thing keeping his sanity intact.

Season One ended brutally. Tommy was zip-tied to a folding chair, hooded and beaten by his nemesis, a sixteen-penny nail driven into his thigh with a thirty-two-ounce rip hammer—broken physically, but absolutely unbowed.

But rather than escalating violence, Landman pivots inward. When Season Two premiered a year later, November 16, 2025, Sheridan and Wallace turned the lens to inheritance: generational trauma, learned brutality, and the ugly bits we pass down.

This storyline is carried by Thomas. Everyone calls him TL, Tommy’s estranged father, played by Sam Elliott with star power and haunted restraint. We meet him in a nursing home, watching sunsets and talking to ghosts. He mourns his wife. He mourns the daughter whose death shattered their family. After that loss, his wife spiraled into addiction. When Tommy was fifteen, he found her passed out drunk. He tried to help. She kicked him in the face, broke his nose, and poured herself another drink. Tommy left home that night. TL stayed. And wildcatted.

Tommy wants nothing to do with his father until Angela (Ali Larter), Tommy's ex-wife-slash-fiancée and permanent emotional accelerant, forces the reckoning between her theme dinners and unabashed trophy-wife energy. You can’t be a father to your kids if you won’t be a son to your father; she tells him. It’s the moment Angela pushes up through the cracks, like a daisy in the sidewalk, transcending the ditsy-blonde beauty-queen chaos. Something deeper is burning here, and it’s what makes her undeniably watchable.

TL becomes the season’s conscience. On a roadside stop, he urinates on a rattlesnake and taunts, “Go ahead. Put me outta my misery.” Later, over steak and sweet tea in a Texas café, he finally schools Tommy: “Look at me, I’m the roadmap to living life wrong. You’ve got it all, son, but you’re too mad or too addicted to the fix to see it.” He isn’t offering advice. He’s reporting from the wreckage.

Tommy defines wildcatting as “drilling on a hunch, dreaming it out of the ground.” In theory, it’s how fortunes are made. In practice, it’s an addiction. The belief that the next hole fixes everything. The next hole doesn’t fix everything.

That idea becomes Season Two’s spine.

The season deepens its bench by adding new predators and bringing back familiar ones with sharper teeth.

Andy Garcia arrives as Gallino. He’s a cartel leader, yes, but he’s now reinventing himself as a slick private-equity oil investor. Across from him, Demi Moore’s Cami Miller is the show’s haute-couture addiction: newly widowed and in charge of her late husband’s company. Cami immediately goes against Tommy’s advice and places a $400 million bet on a Gulf drilling project with a ten percent chance of success. Why? To feel alive. The gamble lights her up. She isn’t just committed. She is hooked.

Tommy widens the circle further when he hires a stripper, Cheyenne (Penny’s her real name, shh), as his father’s “physical therapist” after TL takes a spill into the backyard pool and complains his body is busted. In the pool water, Cheyenne—Francesca Xuereb, having the time of her life—rocks him like a child. Baptism by stripper. Tommy isn’t treating sore muscles. He’s trying to treat the real injury: loss of love, shortage of time, and the vacancy left by feminine touch.

Rebecca Falcone is still the razor blade in a pantsuit, slicing through the oil patch in a black Mercedes AMG GT 4-Door Coupé. Rebecca, played by Kayla Wallace, is all about winning and outworking every man who ever underestimated her. Then Guy Burnet’s Charles Newsom enters as her chemical opposite: a Permian Basin geologist who chooses expensive body wash and mixes a Thermos cocktail of fresh-squeezed watermelon juice, Texas vodka, and a little simple syrup, with the same casual precision he brings to the fieldwork. He sees cathedrals where everyone else sees pumpjacks. Put them together and the show’s promised heat starts to simmer.

The younger register remains crucial, too. Jacob Lofland and Paulina Chávez play Cooper and Ariana with a tender sincerity that keeps the world from going monochrome. They don’t romanticize the Patch; they bounce off each other, circle back, then collide again. These actors find something tender, but nothing comes without a price, and the Patch always sends the bill.

And the stealth comedy remains a secret weapon. Michelle Randolph’s Ainsley is a cheerleader-philosopher who says the quiet parts out loud, then smiles like she’s doing you a favor. She’s unsettling, hilarious, and weirdly logical in her anti-woke worldview, exactly the kind of character the writers refuse to sand down.

The soundtrack understands the assignment. When Tyler Childers’s “Bitin’ List” hits, it’s not just a needle-drop, it’s a mission statement: “And if there ever come a time I got rabies, you’re high on my bitin’ list.” That is Tommy Norris, infected by the world he lives in. Turns out his boss, Cami, is infected too. Tommy’s the first one she bites, and Season Two hints he may not stay prey for long. The music isn’t background; it’s such a part of the show’s DNA that it spun off official releases, MCA’s Landman: Songs from and Inspired by the Paramount+ Original Series (Volumes 1 & 2), including tracks co-written/produced by cast members Billy Bob Thornton and Mark Collie.

And that’s the point: the songs are telling you how this world works. When the pressure spikes, everybody reaches for their version of relief: Angela and Ainsley hit Neiman Marcus, the rig crews chase a beer buzz at backyard BBQs, and Tommy’s relief has always been the job . . . and picking fights with whatever DJ's on the radio.

These men and women drill thousands of feet into the earth.

But the real excavation is internal.

They aren’t drilling for oil so much as meaning, something solid enough to build a life on. Landman doesn’t ask you to approve its worldview. It dares you to contend with the things that get passed down, what gets buried and what keeps resurfacing.

Everyone here is wildcatting.

They’re drilling on a hunch.

Dreaming it out of the ground.

And then, just when you expect the season to end in more blood and broken glass, it doesn’t. It closes with something rare: a gentle reflection. Tommy and Angela stand in fields of gold, and for once nobody’s “drilling.” Angela starts talking about going upstairs to take a bath in nothing but her birthday suit. A tender kiss passes. A beautiful moment held.

Then she saunters off with a promise: “It’s worth watching.”

Season Three will be too.

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Don Michael Paul grew up on the beaches of Southern California but calls Austin, Texas, home. His career as a film director and screenwriter has taken him far and wide, making films on five continents and in three times as many countries and languages. He knows his way around the streets of Hollywood, a place he loves like no other and the subject of his recently finished novel in memoir form, Dead and Cool: Villains, Obsessions, & Starlets. A father, a teacher and an MFA student at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing, he is a massive fan of character-driven mainstream movies that feel deeply familiar and wildly extraordinary all at once. Always open to the road less traveled, he is constantly on the lookout for that one big singular idea! As he likes to say, "I’m still working on my masterpiece."