“Landman” Is in Love With the Myths That Oilmen Tell About Themselves
That they are smug jerks, however, is central to the fact that they also don’t seem great at their jobs. Within a matter of hours, Tommy oversees both a deadly well blowout and a stolen truck crashing into a cartel-owned plane full of cocaine, which we’re led to believe is just the type of thing that happens in the Permian Basin. (It’s not.) Meanwhile, Monty gives $300 million to an entrepreneur who wants to drill some 300 wells in West Texas’s Val Verde Basin, and who came to him because “private banks won’t touch fossil fuels anymore”; such wells can cost $5 million a pop and might barely break even in the first year, making Monty’s investment a potentially very reckless one. Landman is quick to pass judgment on sex workers, gold-digging ex-wives, and cheating husbands, but (at least for now) never on Tommy and Monty.
In that way, Landman is true to life: an accurate representation of oil industry bosses’ own delusional self-aggrandizement. In public and private, executives blame everyone but themselves for real or imagined misfortune—from radical climate activists to Democrats to banks who’ve allegedly stopped financing fossil fuels because they’ve gone woke. But contrary to the entrepreneur who pitches Monty, Wall Street still generously finances oil and gas drilling. What really happened in the Permian Basin is that investors who freely handed out cash during the shale boom had, by 2020, started to lose patience with drillers who’d spent the better part of a decade torching their cash without turning a profit. It’s rare, in real life, for executives to admit they were terrible stewards of capital who’ve been forced to get their balance sheets in order to stay in business. And Landman portrays that lack of accountability faithfully.
It’s to Landman’s credit that it isn’t pure hagiography for the industry itself, and showcases some of the lesser-known, thoroughly unglamorous aspects of life in the Permian: the dangerous roads that crisscross oilfields; the obscene wealth that courses through Midland, and more rough-and-tumble man camps in neighboring Odessa; the fact that the oil and gas business is often less about drilling than land arbitrage. Perhaps that’s why the American Petroleum Institute—an oil and gas industry trade association, funded by M-Tex’s real-world counterparts—runs ads on the Paramount+ stream insisting that fossil fuel companies are good, law-abiding corporate citizens who would never violate OSHA rules or fail to report stolen trucks helping ferry drugs into the United States.
