TL;DR: Landman Season 2 finally feels like it’s drilling in the right direction, thanks to Demi Moore’s powerhouse performance and Andy Garcia’s cold, calculated charm. The show is more gripping, more complex, and more confident—but until its characters evolve with the chaos, it won’t quite hit the gusher it’s chasing.
Landman season 2
There’s something inherently funny about how Taylor Sheridan builds TV universes. Each show is like a different class in a sprawling RPG campaign. Yellowstone is the cowboy tank who refuses to spec into diplomacy. Tulsa King is the surprisingly wholesome barbarian who decided to multiclass into found-family shenanigans. Mayor of Kingstown is the rogue with heavy trauma backstory and a smoky filter over his stat sheet. Special Ops: Lioness is the ranger who takes her job way too seriously. And then there’s Landman, Sheridan’s grizzled oilfield cleric, constantly casting dispel green energy while muttering something about margins and drilling rights. It’s a world that reeks of diesel, debt, and men who think Wi-Fi is a government conspiracy.
Season 1 of Landman had all the pieces on the table to be great television. Billy Bob Thornton as a crisis-hardened oil wrangler? Check. Enough Big Oil money floating around to buy a mid-sized moon? Check. Cartel-adjacent tension simmering on the horizon? Double check. Yet the series spent most of its early life wandering around the Permian Basin like a cowboy who forgot he was supposed to be in a prestige drama. It wasn’t bad, it just didn’t know what it wanted to be. Yellowstone-with-pipelines? Succession-but-dustier? A Sheridan Cinematic Universe side quest?
Season 2, at least based on the first three episodes provided, feels like the show finally got the memo and started reading its own mission briefing. There’s momentum. There’s actual complexity. There are new characters who don’t look like they were created by feeding ChatGPT the prompt angry corporate Texan. But the issue that dragged Season 1 down is still here like gum on a boot heel. Events keep happening, but the characters refuse to evolve with them. And in a prestige drama, static arcs are the narrative equivalent of drilling a dry well.
Landman still revolves around Tommy Norris, played with gravelly perfection by Billy Bob Thornton. Tommy is a crisis manager in the oil industry, which basically means he’s Ghostbusters for billion-dollar disasters. Last season ended with the death of oil baron Monty Miller, and now Monty’s widow Cami, played by Demi Moore, has stepped into the power vacuum with the elegance of someone who knows how to wear grief like armor. I was not prepared for how good Moore is here. She is forceful, vulnerable, calculating, and deeply human in ways this show has never allowed its women to be before.
Of course, because this is Landman, Tommy barely gets a minute to process the shift in leadership before a new threat skids into the narrative like a cartel-funded meteor. Andy Garcia shows up as Galino, a man who speaks softly while holding an invisible machete behind his back. Garcia’s performance is immediately magnetic. He radiates the patient menace of a chess grandmaster who already knows he’s six moves ahead. Sheridan loves writing these cool-as-hell operators, and Garcia plays his part like he’s been waiting his whole career to slink into an oil thriller.
Wrapped around all this is a narrative push involving Tommy’s son, Cooper, who is now orbiting a new enterprise that is extremely promising and extremely dangerous. The kind of dangerous where you look at the contract, smell the paper, and go this feels like cartel toner.
If Season 1 struggled to find identity, Season 2 at least knows it wants to be a high-pressure corporate thriller about liability, legacy, and the very American dream of burning through natural resources like they owe you money.
Billy Bob Thornton remains the gravitational center of Landman. He could read a deposition transcript and still make it sound like outlaw poetry. He brings legitimacy to a character who otherwise risks becoming a mechanical problem solver, an old-school fixer whose main superpower is being the only adult in a room full of billionaires pretending to be cowboys. But I’ll be honest: Tommy hasn’t changed in meaningful ways since Episode 1 of Season 1. He’s still the same walking Marlboro ad with a conscience, and while that’s fun to watch, the lack of evolution makes the stakes land softer than they should.
This is where Demi Moore swoops in and steals the show like she forged a soul stone somewhere off-screen. Her grief, her strength, her corporate confusion, her flashes of cold resolve—it all works. There’s a moment in Episode 3 that hit me harder than anything the show has attempted before, and it’s entirely because Moore plays Cami as someone who simply cannot afford to break.
Andy Garcia, meanwhile, feels like the missing ingredient the show desperately needed. His character adds an element of international tension and moral ambiguity that makes the drama more textured. The cartel-oil financing cross-section is ridiculously compelling, and honestly, this is the lane Landman should have been driving in from the start.
For all the polish, the bigger problem hasn’t changed. Characters in Landman tend to exist in a kind of emotional stasis. Angela, Tommy’s ex-wife, is consistently solid thanks to Ali Larter’s grounded energy, but her arc feels stalled. Ainsley, Tommy’s daughter, barely registers as a fully evolving character. Cooper, to his credit, has the most narrative volatility, but even he feels like a storyline waiting for ignition.
That’s the core issue holding Landman back from true greatness. Events shift, dangers escalate, fortunes rise and fall, but the people themselves rarely transform in ways that reflect the chaos swirling around them. For a show obsessed with the violent instability of the oil industry, its characters are surprisingly resistant to personal seismic activity.
And yet Season 2 really does feel closer than ever to striking gold. The narrative has more range. The emotional stakes feel sharper. The power players are more unpredictable. If the writers allow even one major character to evolve—really evolve—the entire series could level up from decent to genuinely gripping.
There’s a vibe to Season 2 that reminded me of those old PC oil-tycoon simulators from the late 90s—half economics, half moral crisis, sprinkled with cartel danger and the looming existential dread of climate discourse. Watching Tommy navigate corporate bodies and cartel emissaries feels like playing a prestige TV version of SimCity: Permian Basin Edition. The stakes are high, the spreadsheets invisible, and the monoculture slowly dying under the weight of its own ambition. It’s weirdly nostalgic.
If Taylor Sheridan wants Landman to become more than a niche entry in his industrialized TV empire, he has to let the characters grow. Yellowstone works because everyone is constantly transforming or imploding. Tulsa King works because the characters mutate into a weird family of lovable criminals. Landman will only work if its ensemble stops being static set dressing and starts being combustible.
Season 2 is closer than ever to pulling that off. Moore and Garcia bring textures the show desperately needed. Thornton remains the old-school anchor. Cooper’s arc has spark. Now it just needs ignition.
