- Sheridan landed Billy Bob Thornton with one pitch: "Bad Santa running an oil company."
- Landman's viral wind-turbine rant claims renewables never repay their carbon cost—research disagrees.
- Real horizontal-drilling technology behind the Permian Basin boom quadrupled well counts by 2021.
Intro.
Billy Bob Thornton spends most of Landman's pilot doing paperwork, threatening lawyers, and getting shot at—sometimes in the same scene. Before Paramount+ had ordered a single episode, the show's creator sold the whole idea to its star in one line: a drama with Bad Santa running an oil company. Thornton didn't need a second pitch, or even a full script.
Here's the plot.
Landman follows Tommy Norris (Thornton), the crisis-fixer for an independent oil company working the Permian Basin, the West Texas region now responsible for roughly 43% of America's crude oil. Tommy negotiates leases, cleans up rig accidents, and manages his boss's family drama, all while the cartel violence trailing the oil money creeps closer to his own. Ten episodes made up Season 1, premiering November 17, 2024, on Paramount+—the start of what's since become the platform's biggest bet.
Things you didn't know.
Season 1 filmed around Fort Worth, borrowing real Texas oil-world backdrops: the American Association of Professional Landmen's headquarters, the Fort Worth Petroleum Club, and Texas Christian University all appear on-screen. The football thread runs both ways. Inside the story, Tommy's daughter Ainsley falls for Ryder, a local high school quarterback with NFL dreams, before her father catches them and puts a stop to it. Outside it, Billy Bob Thornton and Ali Larter each already had a Texas-football movie on their resume before this one: Thornton coached in 2004's Friday Night Lights, and Larter co-starred in Varsity Blues, a pairing more than one critic has noticed even though nobody's confirmed it was deliberate. Guest star Louanne Stephens goes a layer further: she played Lorraine Saracen on the actual Friday Night Lights series for five seasons before joining Landman as family friend Ethel. The soundtrack, scored by three-time Sheridan collaborator Andrew Lockington, also features songs written and performed by cast members Thornton and Mark Collie—the landman and the sheriff, moonlighting as songwriters.
The showrunner's bet.
Sheridan didn't adapt Boomtown solo. He made Wallace, a journalist with no scripted-TV credits, his co-creator. Landing his lead took one line: Sheridan pitched Thornton on "a drama with Bad Santa running an oil company," building Tommy Norris on the same morally compromised energy Thornton brought to that 2003 role. Thornton said yes on the spot.
The cast, and the roles that almost went elsewhere.
Demi Moore plays Cami Miller, the oil company's steadying force. Jon Hamm played her husband, owner Monty Miller, for a single season. Ali Larter is Tommy's ex-wife, Angela, and Michael Peña rounds out the crew as roughneck Armando. No confirmed reporting exists on who else was considered for these roles—for a cast this deep, that's its own small mystery. By Season 2, the bench had grown further, adding Sam Elliott and Andy Garcia.
Where it came from.
Boomtown started as a Texas Monthly podcast, built from Wallace's year embedded in the Permian oil fields. It was never supposed to be a hit; an oil-industry documentary podcast climbing the charts surprised even its own creator. Sheridan kept the setting and the stakes; nearly everything else—Tommy Norris, the cartel plot, the Norris family—is invention layered onto real reporting.
The invisible hand.
Tommy's most quoted scene isn't about a business deal at all. It's a monologue arguing wind turbines and solar panels cost more carbon to build than they ever save, delivered as settled fact. Off-screen, two peer-reviewed studies put a turbine's carbon payback at somewhere between 64 days and five months, not never—a gap between a confident claim and the actual research that's worth checking before repeating it at a dinner party. The rest of the season runs on quieter math: what a mineral lease is worth, what a roughneck earns next to what an owner takes home, and what a cartel charges for the right to cross a pipeline.
The tech behind the tale.
The boom Tommy manages onscreen is real, and so is the technology behind it. Horizontal wells in the Permian Basin grew from 350 in 2010 to more than 4,500 by 2021, and the drilled length of each well stretched from under 4,000 feet to more than 10,000 feet over the same span, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That combination—longer laterals, more wells, the same patch of West Texas—is the engineering behind why the Permian now supplies nearly half the country's crude. The boom Landman dramatizes is a real one.
By the numbers.
Paramount+ premiered Landman's 10-episode first season on November 17, 2024, and the numbers went vertical fast: 9.9 billion minutes streamed in the fourth quarter of 2024 made it 2024's third-most-watched streaming original, per Luminate, and by the first quarter of 2025 that number climbed to roughly 13.9 billion minutes, ahead of every other scripted drama on the platform. Billy Bob Thornton earned Golden Globe and Critics' Choice nominations for playing Tommy Norris, and the ensemble added a Screen Actors Guild nomination and a Satellite Award for Best Cast. None of it slowed the show down—Season 2's November 2025 premiere pulled in 262% more viewers than Season 1's, and Paramount+ signed on for a third season before the month was out.
Why it's must-watch now.
Season 2 premiered in November 2025 to a premiere-week audience 262% larger than Season 1's, and Season 3 is already renewed, with production underway and no return expected before 2027. Billy Bob Thornton has picked up Golden Globe and Critics' Choice nominations along the way, and the ensemble took home a Satellite Award for Best Cast. None of that was guaranteed by an oil-boom podcast nobody expected to find an audience. Tommy Norris isn't close to finished, and neither is the boom that built him.