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    • Only the bad things from ‘Yellowstone’
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    Only the bad things from ‘Yellowstone’

    Vaseline Posted on

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    There are good TV shows, there are bad TV shows, and then there’s ‘Landman’.

    The new series from “Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan (armed with the blank check Paramount appears to have written him) stars Billy Bob Thornton, Demi Moore and Jon Hamm and is set in the gritty world of oil industry in Texas. It checks all the boxes on Sheridan’s hitmaker list: beloved baby boomer male movie star; cowboy hats; blind worship of capitalism and the rich; and just enough explosions and bloodshed to make it seem like it’s an action show rather than a soap opera.

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    It seems like a formula for another Paramount+/Sheridan win, like “Lioness” or “Lawman: Bass Reeves” or “Tulsa King” or the “Yellowstone” spinoffs “1883 and “1923.” The fans of those series will taste the series and find it equally tasty and delightful. But as I trudged through the dusty episodes of “Landman” (streaming on Sundays,). ★ out of four), something snapped inside me.

    Brought together with little regard for a sensible framework or even for characters whose names you can remember, “Countryman” is Sheridan’s laziest work, and his most obscene. The series would be bad enough if it were just boring and insipid, which it is, but there’s an intensely unpleasant bit of male gaze in there that makes the series read like softcore porn for old men who want to leer at teenagers. girls without any consequences. It borders on downright disgusting, set against a generic setting and plot beats copied from old “Yellowstone” scripts.

    If you can follow the story with its lack of explanation, you will discover that it is about Tommy Norris (Thornton), a fixer for a Texas oil company who makes deals with drug cartels, cooperates with the police and informs families about the deaths of workers on the island. its oil platforms. He works for billionaire Monty Miller (Hamm), whose life seems to consist mostly of talking on the phone with Tommy and making his taciturn wife Cami (Moore) happy.

    Norris’s very difficult daily life is complicated by the antics of his son Cooper (Jacob Lofland), who dropped out of college to work for an oil crew, his promiscuous daughter Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) and his walking cliché of an ex-wife, Angela (Ali Larter). Oh, and there’s a terrible female lawyer (Kayla Wallace) in town who has to protect Monty’s company from liability after an accident, and she dares to ask a man like Tommy to talk to her respectfully.

    These characters look like they were copied and pasted from a ‘Screenwriting for Dummies’ book. Angela is a bad mother who is oversexed and spoiled by her new husband. What a unique take on an ex-wife! Cooper is ungrateful and thinks he knows better than his wise father. I’ve never seen a son character like that before. The lawyer’s name is Rebecca Savage, to further help point out the icy feminine stereotype she’s based on.

    And then we come to Ainsley, whose presence in the series makes things seem indecent. There hasn’t been this much inappropriate footage of an actress playing an underage girl since Michael Bay picked up a camera for his “Transformer” films. From her lewd and unrealistic dialogue (I can’t imagine any teenager telling her father that she allows her boyfriend to ejaculate on her body), to her willingness to strip naked and show off in front of old men, Ainsley is a figment of someone’s imagination. And now I can’t watch the predatory images of her in the shower or using Crisco as sunscreen lotion while a bald old man ogles her.

    Not only is the series needlessly abusing this spoiled, pouting male-fantasy-in-purple-bikini character – even though it is – it’s also a sexist, solipsistic mess on top of a stupid, boring story. over cardboard cutout characters.

    Whether you like Sheridan’s particular style of overwrought Western, the writer-director-producer has a knack for melodrama, and this is a story that could have been so juicy and tasty if it had gone in a different direction. Based on the podcast “Boomtown” from Imperative Entertainment and Texas Monthly, it captures an intensely relevant slice of modern life. Oil is kind of a big deal, if you’ve somehow missed all the politicians, billionaires, and activist debates about the role of fossil fuels in our culture and economy.

    That the Texas setting and the oil industry feel interchangeable with the South American backdrop and big corporations is a criminal waste of the source material. The show lacks specificity and suffers greatly for it. Even its structure is something you might find elsewhere: It so slavishly follows the story beats that worked for the writer and producer of “Yellowstone” that you could just slap Thornton in Kevin Costner’s cowboy boots and call it a day can make.

    As much as Paramount would like its golden boy to be able to come up with an endless number of hits from Middle America that will eventually propel the struggling Paramount+ into the streaming stratosphere, that simply won’t happen. We live in an age of endless sequels and remakes; originality is rare and valuable. Sheridan used to be such a distinctive individual. Now he only copies himself.

    So thanks, but I may just watch “Yellowstone” again.

    Vaseline
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