There are few character types on television that seem as exhausting as the one guy who knows how to get things done on a Taylor Sheridan show. From Kevin Costner Yellowstone against Jeremy Renner Mayor of Kingstown – and now Billy Bob Thornton on Sheridan’s new drama Husbandman – these men are constantly running from one crisis to another, all someone else’s fault, and no one else seems to have the first idea how to solve them.

Every writer puts something of themselves into the characters they write, and it’s not hard to draw a line from Costner’s John Dutton or Thornton’s Tommy Norris to their creator, who in the six years since has become a one-man television drama factory. Yellowstone debuted. Husbandman is Sheridan’s eighth series to premiere in that period. With some shows, like Tulsa Kinghe will delegate responsibilities, but he often prefers to do as much of it himself as possible. Although there was a short period in it Yellowstone Season two, in which Sheridan co-wrote episodes with others, the vast majority of the series is credited to him alone as a writer. This year alone, his name will be the only name on the scripts of 24 different hours of television Yellowstone, HusbandmanAnd Lioness (formerly known as Special Operations: Lioness). He also periodically directs episodes of his shows, especially early ones, handles other producing duties, and continually develops ideas for new series, whether set in the Yellowstone universe or not.

Sheridan is far from the first showrunner to hold the reins of his series so tightly, and he’s not even close to setting a record this year, either. There was a TV season where Aaron Sorkin wrote or co-wrote 36 different episodes Sports evening And The West Wingand another where David E. Kelley wrote or co-wrote 47 several episodes of The practice And Ally McBeal. That Sheridan’s shows are doing shorter seasons than what Sorkin, Kelley or Shonda Rhimes used to do evens things out to some extent. Nevertheless, he does one lot of jobs on many different shows at once, and his explanation for this in interviews sounds like something one of his leading men might say: Ultimately, no one understands this territory better than Taylor Sheridan herself.

But as the one who has so much control over the fictional lives of John Dutton and company, Sheridan is also probably best suited to recognize the limitations of this solo approach to problem solving. Because its protagonists are always so overloaded, more often than not their solutions inadvertently lead to even more catastrophes that, again, only they can solve. And the more (cowboy) hats Taylor Sheridan tries to wear, the more worn the end product becomes. Husbandman often plays as if someone else asked ChatGPT to make a Sheridan-esque drama, or else as if Sheridan wrote a rough first draft of each script, and simply ran out of time or energy to polish them into the versions he wants people to see. Billy Bob Thornton’s sheer charisma and talkativeness cover up some of the gaps in the material, but many of the plots and characters feel terribly thin, and others come across as so retrograde as to verge on self-parody.

Like most of Sheridan’s work, Husbandman is a slick 1980s primetime soap opera dressed in the trappings of a contemporary anti-hero drama – Dallas with swearing, more violence and nudity. We meet Tommy in a vulnerable spot, where he is held at gunpoint by a drug cartel enforcer. They have a thorny problem to solve: the cartel owns a piece of land outside Midland, Texas

Related content Midland’s sister city Odessa was the setting for the Friday evening lights film that Thornton starred in, and in one episode he even plays a game with the Permian Panthers, the team he coached in the film. The Husbandman the opening credits and theme song, meanwhile, resonate quite shamelessly Friday evening lights the TV program. The atmosphere and level of execution are also enormously different Husbandmanand both versions of

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From there we are introduced to the rest of Tommy’s friends and family. His son Cooper (Jacob Lofland) has dropped out of college to learn the oil business from the ground up and works on a drilling crew with experienced wildcatters Luis (Emilio Rivera) and Armando (Michael Peña). His spoiled teenage daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) flies in to spend the weekend at the McMansion company Tommy shares with lawyer Nathan (Colm Feore) and engineer Dale (James Jordan), and ends up sticking around. And Tommy’s business is regularly interrupted by FaceTime calls with his bitter ex-wife Angela (Ali Larter). As various problems explode (some of them literally), Monty is also forced to turn to outside help in the form of Rebecca (Kayla Wallace), whose youth and bright-eyed attitude puts her on Tommy’s bad side.

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But while Hamm has barely anything to do, Demi Moore has less than nothing to do as his wife Cami, whose only notable scene in the early episodes is encouraging Monty to take his pills and exercise more regularly. And simply because she’s so strange, Cami turns out to be the least worst female character on the show. Every other woman is some combination of stupid, hyper-sexualized, angry, humorless, or shrill. Many of Angela’s conversations with Tommy involve her alternately yelling at him and offering sexual favors. Rebecca is a progressive scold who thinks she’s too good for these people and their business, and it’s very clear that she’s being set up to have her pants dropped (perhaps metaphorically, but probably literally) by Tommy . (When she objects to him calling her “the lady” of a bartender, he quips back, “Oh, did I guess wrong? I’m sorry, sir.”)

The most effective material comes from Cooper’s interactions with Luis and his team, who come across as real people rather than functionaries in the series’ plots, and which suggest that there is a compelling story to be told about the workings of working-class life in an oil company. boomtown. But Rivera and Peña are written out very early on, the show quickly loses interest in the community, and Luis and Armando’s replacements are cartoon characters who simply cause problems for Cooper and start even more fires for Tommy to put out. Popular storiesTommy, Monty and others often talk about the dangers of running a business dependent on a natural resource that is rapidly dwindling and for which they believe there is no realistic replacement. They’re just going to do whatever they can to pump out the oil and money while they can, consequences be damned. Perhaps Sheridan insists on doing so much of the work himself because he fears that the television world is similarly on the verge of extinction, and that the best he can do is write as many episodes as he can, as long as there are still locations for him to he can do that. . It contains interesting raw material

Husbandman just like it is in almost everything Sheridan makes. But to get it out of the ground and flowing, Sheridan may want to stop doing it all himself. The first two episodes of