Shut the door. Have a seat. Let me tell you about how Landman—one of TV’s most frustratingly sloppy and at times borderline plotless prestige dramas—successfully pulled off its own version of one of the best television episodes of all time.
Granted, “successfully” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Landman is still Landman, not Mad Men. But judged against the show’s usual standards, the season-two finale “Tragedy And Flies” is downright thrilling and impressively crafty. No, it’s not on par with Man Men’s “Shut The Door. Have A Seat.” (Few TV episodes are.) But it’s consistently entertaining and only a little bit infuriating. For Landman, that’s a win.
The best thing about “Tragedy And Flies” is that it gives Billy Bob Thornton’s Tommy Norris something to do besides his usual “woe is me” wailing. At the end of last week’s episode, Tommy’s old friend Cami Miller fired him from his position as the president of the oil company M-Tex due to incessant insubordination and general whininess. Forced to take control of his own life and career, Tommy stops sniping and starts planning.
His big play involves his son Cooper’s incredibly productive but poorly financed oil-drilling leases. At the start of this season, Tommy bailed Cooper out of a jam by having M-Tex take over the leases, but due to the usual chaos surrounding the Norris family and M-Tex, the paperwork remains in flux. If Tommy can persuade one of his cash-rich acquaintances to invest, he and Cooper can start their own family-owned, family-operated oil company.
So that’s what this episode is about, in part. In an uncommonly tense and snappily paced hour (for Landman, that is), we see Tommy racing around the Dallas-Fort Worth area, taking meetings and working his phone, trying to lock down the money and the employees he needs to launch CTT Oil Exploration And Cattle. (Tommy tacks on “And Cattle” just in case there’s already a “CTT Oil Exploration” incorporated somewhere.) Thornton looks actively engaged, bringing the level of his character up above his standard “wryly peeved” mode. It’s a treat to see.
I say this is what the episode’s about “in part,” because Sheridan can never just tell one simple, exciting, uncluttered story. Calamity upon calamity keeps crashing in on Tommy as he gets closer to the finish line of his big deal, such that at one point he literally screams to the sky, pleading, “Can you give me a fuckin’ chance?”
He shouts this after encountering the biggest and, frankly, the most ridiculous distraction in his day. In last week’s episode, Cooper found his fiancée Ariana unconscious in the alley behind the cafe where she works, having been beaten up while defending herself from a sexual assault. Cooper pulled the assailant off of Ariana and punched him 17 times. The next day begins with Cooper and Ariana heading to the police station to report her attack.
But surprise! While Ariana is making her statement, two plainclothes detectives pull Cooper into an interrogation room. It seems the man he clobbered died in the hospital; and using security camera footage, the cops can tell Cooper knocked him out long before he finished punching. Because the dead guy was an out-of-town oil bigwig—the life-blood of the Permian Basin economy—the authorities intend to make an example of our man.
I’m of two minds about this subplot. On the one hand, this is the kind of Sheridan maximalism that makes his work hard to take seriously. His shows are littered with dead bodies and battered women, all meant to spice up the action and provide a momentary—often very momentary—complication. Do we really think that a man who beat the crap out of his fiancée’s would-be rapist is in real legal trouble? In Texas? As for the “but he killed an oilman!” explanation… Cooper’s an oilman, too. So’s his dad. Everyone in town knows—and likes—Tommy. This storyline is a non-starter.
But did I enjoy seeing M-Tex’s feisty feminist lawyer Rebecca roar into the interrogation room to chew out some overzealous lawmen? Look, I’m not made of stone. In these fraught political times, it’s incredibly satisfying to hear Rebecca bring up these detectives’ “officer-involved shooting” histories, threaten to sue them on behalf of their victims’ families, and then use every argument they levy against Cooper in court against them. Yes, this is all very silly. But it gets the blood pumping.
The Rebecca scenes also complicate the narrative that Yellowstone, Landman, and the like are just right-wing apologia. Sheridan lets his liberal characters cook sometimes. He knows how to push those Blue State buttons too. (I admit it: I chuckled with delight when Rebecca mentions one detective shooting a man 11 times in the chest, then turns to Cooper and asks, “How much ‘use of force’ training have you received?”)
Here’s another “not as Red State as you think” case-in-point: Ainsley Norris’s shifting relationship with her nonbinary college roommate, Paigyn Meester (Bobbi Salvör Menuez). Earlier this season, Paigyn provoked an acutely painful Landman moment, when Ainsley’s mom Angela barged into a TCU academic advisor’s office to complain about her daughter being forced to sleep in the same room with some gender-bending oddball (portrayed, in their introduction, as the worst possible caricature of a woke scold). In this episode, though, at the first TCU cheerleading practice, Paigyn—one of the team’s trainers—offers Ainsley sound advice on how to take care of her ankles. Later, Ainsley defends her roommate when some obnoxious high-school boys mock Paigyn. It’s nice.
It almost seems like Sheridan’s making an effort in the season finale to address some of the biggest complaints leveled at this show. For one thing, Ainsley’s much more muted than usual, intent on making a good impression on her cheerleading coach. She’s actually…self-aware? Is that a thing Ainsley can be? Angela’s flamboyance is also toned down to a more tolerable level, although Sheridan does carve out a few minutes for Tommy to defend her exuberant nature. (“You want every moment to be an experience; you want every night to be a honeymoon,” he explains. “I think it’s beautiful.”)
Sheridan isn’t wholly reformed. Perhaps to make up for turning down the volume on Ainsley and Angela, he throws in a scene with Cheyenne—the stripper who doubles as a physical therapist for Tommy’s dad, T.L.—in which she walks around the house in a cropped T-shirt and skimpy panties, blatantly unconcerned with any disapproving eyes. The way this season’s story plays out is also unfair to Cami, who’s depicted as hopelessly naive and gullible, perhaps deserving of being swindled by her old buddy Tommy.
Cami could be a problem for Tommy in season three. So could the cartel boss Gallino, the well-heeled backer Tommy ultimately leans on. Tommy uses his fast-paced jargon-slinging ways to talk Gallino into shifting his money from Cami to CTT Oil Exploration (and cattle). The crime boss does warn Tommy though that if their partnership sours, “The thing you love the most, that’s the first thing I’ll take.” So that’s concerning.
Still, this episode is mainly about Tommy’s triumphs. With Rebecca’s help, he gets Cooper out of trouble. He opens up emotionally to Angela, telling her how much she means to him. Sheridan keeps throwing up barriers for Tommy to maneuver around—including, at one point, a multi-car wreck on the interstate—and Tommy keeps pressing ahead. (After the near-crash, he grumbles, “That was low, God.” It’s almost like he’s complaining to his actual creator: Taylor Sheridan.)
The episode ends with Tommy gathering his family and friends—along with the employees he poached from M-Tex, including Rebecca and Nate—to announce the new company that they’re all going to help run. For everyone (like myself) who enjoys watching Thornton in Landman but hates how exaggeratedly miserable his character is so much of the time, this ending is an unexpected but welcome little gift. It’s fun to see a plan come together.
Do I expect Landman season three to be all about a successful and happy Tommy Norris? Of course not. He tells Angela in the finale’s closing minutes that there will be tough times ahead, so they should enjoy having won this day. But I liked Angela’s response: “Baby, I win every day. You do too; you just don’t see it.”
One of my biggest beefs with Landman—and with Sheridan’s work in general—is that Sheridan expects us to have sympathy for men with money and power just because those men mistakenly think they’re one scary phone call away from losing everything. I don’t expect everything to go smoothly for these guys. Drama demands conflict, after all. But when it comes to privileged protagonists like Tommy, as this finale proves, their stories are so much more enjoyable when they lighten up a little.
Stray observations
- • This finale opens with a couple of radio DJs making a big deal about how hot it is in the Basin. At no point in the remainder of the episode is the heat really a factor. So it’s just…one more damn thing, I guess?
- • Adding to the absurdity of the Cooper storyline is the revelation late in the episode that the man he beat up actually died of a heart attack. It really makes no sense for the cops to hold him accountable.
- • Before Tommy makes his deal with Gallino, he tries to work with a more legitimate associate, who turns him down but offers Tommy a job with “a seven-figure salary.” This is what I mean when I say that Tommy needs to stop being so doomy all the time. He could be as rich as he wants!
- • When Tommy wants to gather everyone at the end of the day for his big announcement, he says to Cooper, “I need you to Gen-Z me up a group text.” This is one of the reasons it’s hard to dismiss the Sheridan shows as potboiler pap. Whenever people aren’t yelling at each other, the dialogue does pop.
Noel Murray is a contributor to The A.V. Club.
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