There’s a viral clip from the series premiere of the Taylor Sheridan creation Landman that gets dragged up whenever a habitué wants to explain to the uninitiated how bonkers this show can be. In it, Ainsley, the teenage daughter character played by Michelle Randolph, brightly explains to her dad, played by Billy Bob Thornton, that she and her boyfriend are, indeed, having sex—but she won’t get pregnant, because their rule is “As long as he never comes in me, he can come anywhere on me.” (She said that to her dad? Yes, she did.)
Despite—or because of—this kind of nonhuman dialogue, the show was an unexpected hit for Paramount+ in late 2024. Landman’s main character is Tommy Norris, a lifelong “fixer” for oil companies who’s played with weary omnicompetence by Thornton. Watching the first season of Landman required the non-fossil-fuel-pilled among us to metabolize a hefty amount of pro-oil culture war. Sometimes, the show was hardly bearable, as when you’re asked to swallow the idea that a hotshot young female lawyer working for an oil company needs a fake-news Tommy Norris lecture on the doomed economics of wind energy. Despite this, I forgave the show a lot for Thornton’s tired, foxy charm, and for one particular romantic subplot involving Tommy’s son Cooper (Jacob Lofland). (Sheridan can—if the wind blows just right—buckle down and write one for the lovers.)
In the Season 2 premiere of Landman, released on Sunday, Billy Bob is still doing his thing, and Demi Moore (who plays the widow of Tommy’s former boss) now has actual lines and scenes, but the good news ends there. It becomes clear that the worst parts of Landman have gotten a lot, lot worse. Those “worst parts” would be any scene involving Tommy’s daughter Ainsley and ex-wife Angela Norris (Ali Larter), twin blond bombshells and best friends whose antics seem written to be comic relief but, instead, make me unbearably sad. Watching these two ladies has always been an unsettling experience—Angela and Ainsley are unmitigatedly silly, incurious, and avaricious—but this season, it’s gone from bad to dire.
Two scenes in the Season 2 premiere showed me that, unfortunately, Sheridan is committed to continuing the Norris-woman bit. Angela, a self-described trophy wife, has been divorced from Tommy for about a decade but came back into his life in Season 1. Ainsley is a high school senior who has now broken up with that lucky boyfriend and is hoping to go to Texas Christian University, where she will have a place on the cheerleading team. Mother and daughter visit TCU for some kind of campus interview that they believe will decide whether Ainsley can go to the school. (They’re wrong about that, as they often are.)
The conversation that ensues between Ainsley and Greta, an admissions officer, is a classic Sheridan culture-war rant—familiar to anyone who has watched Yellowstone—disguised as a scene between characters on a television show. Wearing a corset-style babydoll dress, long blond hair tumbling over her bare shoulders, Ainsley explains that one reason she wants to go to TCU is that it doesn’t have a policy against cheerleaders dating athletes. Stumbling brightly through her argument, she red-pills: “It seems detrimental to humanity in general that a university would try to keep the prettiest girls from dating the tallest, most athletic boys, who could then get married and make babies who are really pretty and athletic, like even more athletic than their parents.” Ainsley can tell Greta’s not buying it, and so she starts crying, begging to be let into the school, looking pretty and miserable as she runs down a list of all the TCU merch she’s already purchased. (The more you watch this show, the more you realize the famous “I let him come on me, not in me” viral scene is just a Sheridan joke about Ainsley’s intellect. Yes, she says that to her father. She can’t read the room—she’s never had to.)
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During this interchange, Greta, a fiftysomething lady with a brunette bob, seethes with annoyance, recognizing this girl in front of her as the child of oil money who’s not that bright and is too pretty to have ever been challenged on anything. We viewers know that this is true, but there can be no sympathy for Greta either. For Sheridan, a female gatekeeper at a university is, by her very nature, a villain. Greta pours on the contempt, describing Ainsley’s eugenics-lite speech as “easily the most offensive and elitist statement ever uttered in this office … so offensive I’m finding it difficult to articulate my shock and utter disgust.”
“You’re using a lot of words I don’t fully understand,” Ainsley cries, to which Greta responds, meanly, “On purpose.” Two women—one a silly but pretty young girl; the other a bitter, middle-aged functionary in the Longhouse—go into an office. Which one comes out a winner?
The answer, more broadly speaking, is neither, but in this case, we find out that Greta must let Ainsley into the university because she’s a cheerleader. At the celebration dinner Angela cooks for Ainsley that night, we get a second, maybe worse, Norris-woman scene. Angela has a (not funny to me, but clearly funny to Sheridan) habit of imposing unnecessarily fussy gourmet meals on the people who live in the oil company house where the Norrises are bunking. On this night, she has made cacio e pepe, which she’s serving wearing a very tight snakeskin minidress, and has purchased a very expensive white truffle at Central Market to shave on top of the pasta.
“Have you ever noticed the closer she gets to her period, the more complicated the dinner dishes become?” Tommy, who I must remind you is Angela’s actual husband, and a person who’s supposed to be good with people for his job, remarks to one of the other men at the table. “I swear to God, if aliens came down here and rounded us up and put us into zoos, those little fucking spacemen could watch this shit for hours … They could watch women argue all fucking day.”
The group gets through blessing the meal and starts talking about the Norrises’ plans to buy a house, before Tommy says, in front of the assembled party: “Honey, I don’t think home purchases should be committed to during the current arc of your cycle.” An incensed Angela destroys the dinner table, throwing plates at the wall, ripping up the tablecloth, and sending every person in the house running. Yes, you kind of want her to do it. And yes, she forgives Tommy, after he placates her with a compliment: “Before you kill me, I just want to say, your tits look great in that little tiny bra.” (Finally! The fixer does some fixing.)
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A few episodes in, later this season, a crew working for Tommy and including one of the men staying at the house with the Norrises has a seriously perilous day at work that I will be vague about so as not to spoil. The guy comes home, dragging, demoralized, and covered in dirt, and Ainsley is doing handsprings in the backyard, an unstoppable, bubbly, eternally beautiful Texas fembot. The contrast between the grim scene out at the worksite and this gorgeous girl, who will never—like her mother before her—truly understand what goes into making the money that keeps her so innocent, is supposed to convey something deep about class, or maybe about men and women. And the scene, like all of Landman, requires Ainsley to be a piece of cardboard, unchangeable, annoying, unable to grow.
There are other women in Landman who make sense—Cooper’s girlfriend, Ariana (Paulina Chávez), the widow of an oil worker who died on the job, who tells Cooper she wants to break up with him after he strikes it rich, because she doesn’t want to live a wealthy life; the quiet, intense Cami Miller (Moore), who is grieving her husband while coming to terms with the financial mess he left behind for her. Taylor Sheridan can do it. The Norris women feel like evidence that this writer, whose shows are unremittingly heavy, just wanted to try his hand at humor, for once. The misogyny is just a hazardous byproduct.
