A studio struck oil in Texas.

Intro.#

Billy Bob Thornton spends most of the Landman¹ 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 Basin², 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+, a run that would go on to outdraw every other scripted drama on the platform within months.

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, Thornton, Larter, and guest star Louanne Stephens each brought their own Texas-football pedigree to the show³: the soundtrack, scored by three-time Sheridan collaborator Andrew Lockington⁴, 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. He's also the lead of Magnitude's Your Friends & Neighbors⁵ write-up, playing a hedge fund manager who diversifies into burglary after Wall Street cuts him loose. 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.#

Boomtown⁶ 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, including Tommy Norris, the cartel plot, and 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 payback⁷ at somewhere between 64 days and five months, not never. That's a gap between a confident claim and the actual research, one 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 Administration⁸. That combination of longer laterals, more wells, and 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 Luminate⁹, 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.

Side notes#

1. Landman — The show streams exclusively on Paramount+, and its IMDb page carries the full cast and episode guide alongside the official trailer for anyone catching up before diving in. Watch on IMDb ↩

2. Permian Basin — The basin takes its name from the Permian period, roughly 299 to 251 million years ago, when an ancient sea covered the region and left behind the rock layers now producing the oil and gas Tommy fights over. Learn more ↩

3. Texas-football pedigree — Thornton starred in 2004's Friday Night Lights and Larter in Varsity Blues, two of the era's defining Texas-football movies, and guest star Louanne Stephens closes the loop: she spent five seasons playing Lorraine Saracen on the Friday Night Lights television series before joining Landman as family friend Ethel. Learn more ↩

4. Andrew Lockington — Lockington's other Taylor Sheridan credits are Mayor of Kingstown and Special Ops: Lioness Season 2, each scored in its own distinct sonic style; Landman's brooding, guitar-inflected main title theme is streaming now. Listen on Spotify ↩

5. Your Friends & Neighbors — Magnitude's Remote entry on Jon Hamm's other 2024 role, an Apple TV+ drama about a hedge fund manager who turns to burglarizing his own neighbors after Wall Street cuts him loose. Read the Remote entry ↩

6. Boomtown — Christian Wallace's Texas Monthly podcast, hosted by the West Texas native and former roughneck whose year embedded in the Permian oil fields became the show's source material. Listen on Texas Monthly ↩

7. Carbon payback — A 2016 peer-reviewed life-cycle study found the largest wind turbines tested paid back their manufacturing emissions in as little as 64 days, and fact-checkers have repeatedly rated the "turbines never pay off" version of Tommy's claim false. Learn more ↩

8. U.S. Energy Information Administration — The federal government's independent statistical agency for energy data; its Permian Basin reporting is the same data set industry analysts and researchers cite when tracking the region's drilling boom. Read the EIA report ↩

9. Luminate — Formerly known as MRC Data and built on the old Nielsen Music and Nielsen Entertainment measurement systems, Luminate is the industry's standard tracker for streaming and sales data, and it also powers the Billboard charts. Learn more ↩