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Warning: This post contains spoilers from the Season 2 finale of “Landman.” Proceed accordingly.
The first executive board meeting of CTT Oil Exploration & Cattle is now called to order!
The tumultuous Season 2 of “Landman” came to an end Sunday with an episode that set up the already-renewed series’ next season: Tommy got Gallino (instead of MTex) to bankroll Cooper’s wells, and in the process created a new oil company staffed entirely by Norris family members and soon-to-be-ex-MTex employees. (Read a full finale recap here.)
What does that move mean for Cami and the company she was struggling to run in Monty’s absence? And should Tommy really be getting into business with the crime boss he was trying to avoid all season? I took those questions — and a bunch more — to series star/executive producer Billy Bob Thornton and series co-creator/EP Christian Wallace. Read on to see what they had to say.
Will Cami — and Demi Moore — still be on the show next season?
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Christian Wallace is aware of what we all want to know — will Demi Moore’s Cami be around next season? — so he looks apologetic as he says, “I cannot speak to much of what is going to happen. All I can say is: I think it presents so many new opportunities for these characters, and opportunities for a different set of dynamics between the characters’ relationships to one another and their relationship to ambition.”
The biggest change for Tommy & Co., which the EP can talk about, is that “they’re starting from the ground up” with the newly christened CTT Oil Exploration & Cattle, “rather than being in this pre-made, well-established company,” he adds. “They’re starting from scratch, essentially, and that is exciting to me.”
In announcing the new venture, Tommy said that he’d be senior vice president, a role much closer to his landman roots than his experience as MTex head. “You can see how glum Tommy is, having to get on a private jet all the time,” Wallace says. “A lot of us might be thrilled by that prospect of this more glamorous lifestyle, but Tommy really thrives whenever he’s in the patch, in the field with the hands and really working more of the day-to-day operations.”
He adds: “This gives him an opportunity to lean into some of the stuff that he enjoys most out of this very difficult job.”
Tommy’s near-car crash was ‘all basically for a one-liner gag’
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Christian Wallace jokes that the harrowing, multi-car pileup that Tommy somehow avoided “was probably the most work anyone has ever done for a gag like that.” The scene, which he says took the better part of a day to shoot, has no relevance except to zing a harried Tommy right after he’s yelled at God to do his worst. “I think we shot it on a Saturday, a huge stunt sequence, basically for a one-liner gag,” Wallace says, chuckling. “But that’s part of what makes this show so fun. It can be over-the-top like that.”
Tommy ‘feels like he’s got the old gang back together’
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Tommy certainly seemed far happier than normal at the end of the finale, as his family and friends agreed to join him at the new company. And he was, Billy Bob Thornton says — but maybe don’t get used to it. “I’m not sure Tommy ever trusts happiness,” the Oscar winner explains, “which, by the way, is not that different from me.” He laughs. “I always tell people that I’m 50% happy and 50% sad, all at once, all the time.”
That said: Tommy’s joy at the end of the episode, Thornton continues, is genuine. “He feels like he’s got the old gang back together. He feels like he’s got the family together and can finally breathe easy a little bit, because there’s a freedom in doing it yourself. That’s probably the most satisfaction he has out of this. It’s like, ‘Well, you know what? We may win, we may lose. But one way or the other, it’s our own thing, and we can do it the way we want to do it.'”
What else is Gallino up to?
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Following his incredibly violent introduction in the Season 1 finale, Andy Garcia’s Gallino showed up in Season 2 as a nattily dressed businessman with an impressive Fort Worth office, a vivacious wife and a closet full of tailored suits. We should assume that he’s still a full-on drug kingpin, right?
“That’s one of the most fascinating things about this show is how you have these two multifaceted, super complex — I won’t necessarily call being in the cartel an ‘industry,’ but the drug trade, right? And it is multifaceted and multinational, and you have the suits side and you have the boots on the ground. That is not dissimilar — I’m not comparing the two, apples to apples — but it is not dissimilar to the oil industry in that you have almost completely different worlds, although they are dependent on each other.”
He continues: “The boots on the ground in West Texas, they depend on the suits in Fort Worth, Dallas, Houston. And the suits depend on the roughnecks and the roustabouts and everybody out in the Permian Basin… There’s more to explore in both those worlds, and others, that we haven’t quite gotten to yet.”
What’s all this about cattle?
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Tommy has Nate add “& Cattle” to the new company’s name for legal reasons, but might the Norris men branch out into the herd business at some point in the future? “I mean, there’s definitely always a possibility in a Taylor Sheridan show that you’re gonna get some cattle,” Christian Wallace says, laughing. “To be honest, though, that’s not a stretch in this series at all. A lot of ranchers have supplemented their cattle industry by leasing wells or by owning their own wells and starting small businesses. There’s actually a pretty big thread in the Permian Basin for cattle and oil to be intertwined.”
