ost TV writers would love to be Taylor Sheridan. Some might profess not to be fans – they might even be snobby about his work, claiming it to be vulgar and too popular with American conservatives – but plenty crave the status he now enjoys: he is more famous than his shows. What’s Landman? It’s the new Taylor Sheridan.
What really matters, though, is the ability to slam down a zinger. Sheridan is an able dramatist, but his real calling is as an epigrammatist, and in Landman he properly lets rip. Almost everything that Tommy – “a divorced alcoholic with $500,000 in debt, and I’m one of the lucky ones” – says is quoteworthy pith, as he metaphorically and sometimes literally fights fires in an industry where “there’s two types of people: dreamers and losers”.