For what it’s worth, with a full season under its belt now, Landman might just be the best Taylor Sheridan series to date (1923 is close, although that might be damning with faint praise). Sheridan has always had a knack for attracting top-tier talent — Harrison Ford, Jeremy Renner, Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, and Sylvester Stallone, to name a few. While his writing can sometimes be blunt and heavy-handed, his ability to craft believable relationship dramas and set them against chaotic backdrops is underrated.
Landman, however, rises above Sheridan’s other works for a few reasons, including the sense of humor buried underneath the oil industry moralizing — likely a nod to its source material, Christian Wallace’s podcast Boomtown. Whether the humor stems more from Sheridan’s writing or the performances of Billy Bob Thornton and Ali Larter is not entirely clear, but there’s no denying that this show is legitimately funny.
What truly sets Landman apart, however, is how deeply it draws from the Friday Night Lights playbook —and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills because no one seems to be talking about how brazenly Landman rips off the FNL aesthetic. Maybe it’s not entirely Sheridan’s doing; maybe it’s a byproduct of setting a show in West Texas and shooting it in Austin or Fort Worth. But the parallels are hard to miss.
Sheridan’s visual storytelling feels like a direct homage to FNL: the sweeping shots of Texas plains, the handheld intimacy of its close-ups, and the way the land itself becomes a character. These elements don’t just create atmosphere; they underline the themes shared by both series. Like FNL, Landman converges around personal lives, professional ambitions, and local politics, whether it’s a football team fighting for a state championship or a landman risking it all on a chance at generational wealth. Both shows explore how football in one and oil in the other define and often confine their characters.
Taylor Sheridan feels like a guy who saw Peter Berg’s career and decided to emulate it: an actor turned writer-director who gravitates toward working-class narratives. Berg, of course, not only created the Friday Night Lights TV series but also directed the 2004 movie starring Billy Bob Thornton. And while Berg adapted FNL from his cousin Buzz Bissinger’s nonfiction account of Permian High School football, Sheridan took inspiration for Landman from a nonfiction podcast by journalist Christian Wallace. Bissinger’s book was set in Permian High School in Odessa, Texas. In Landman, guess where the high school quarterback who is dating the daughter of Thornton’s character goes?
Ali Larter’s performance in Landman is another clear callback to FNL. She plays a sexier, more vampish version of Connie Britton’s Tami Taylor, though it’s hard not to also see shades of Larter’s role in Varsity Blues — it’s almost as if she’s channeling a grown-up version of that character, but the drawl and the swagger is pure Tami. That is not a complaint.
Then there’s the show’s cinematography. Much of Landman is directed by Stephen Kay, a veteran of Friday Night Lights, and the influence is unmistakable: handheld camera work and sweeping shots of the Texas plains. And then there’s the music. I played some of Landman’s score for my wife, and without hesitation, she guessed it was from Friday Night Lights. It feels like a deliberate homage to Explosions in the Sky, the band whose ethereal, melancholy sound defined FNL. Interestingly, the music team behind Landman has worked on other Sheridan projects and otherwise has no noticeable connection to West Texas, which means Sheridan likely asked for something that echoed FNL. Even the Georgia-set Heels didn’t channel that vibe as strongly. (In fact, the second comment on this video is a reference to the similarities to the FNL score).
I also get that when you’re pulling actors from central Texas, there’s bound to be overlap, but casting Louanne Stephens (a.k.a. Grandma Saracen) in a show this similar to FNL feels almost like trolling Peter Berg and Jason Katims. It’s as if Sheridan is saying, “I’m ripping you off. What are you going to do about it?” That said, Stephens’s role as a hilariously raunchy retirement-home resident who yearns for one last “dick shoved in her face” and throws shade at strippers — “skinny bitches” — is brilliant. Granny Saracen’s still got it.
There are plenty of issues with Landman, particularly in how it handles its female characters and, even worse, in its depiction of the relationship between Thornton’s character and his daughter (yikes!). Still, it’s undeniably entertaining and dryly funny. Most importantly — especially in the dynamic between Jacob Lofland and Paulina Chávez — it captures the same bittersweet longing that permeates Friday Night Lights. While it might feel more like the off-the-rails second season of FNL, that distinctive imprint is undeniably there.