A day at the office might end in anything from making parental memories to cartels putting bags on heads for Landman protagonist Tommy Norris, but there’s one key part of real landmen’s lives that audiences wouldn’t know from the series.
Tommy, played by Billy Bob Thornton, rarely has a boring day at work. He’s been in clandestine meetings with drug lords, had friends die, and nearly has a medical crisis every time his daughter Ainsley does… well, anything.
Landman, based on Christian Wallace’s ‘Boomtown’ podcast about big oil, focuses on the experiences of real-life landmen, but there’s a major difference that series fans might not expect.
Landman fans are missing out on a lot of paperwork
Deadline’s January 2025 interview with Wallace reveals that, while Tommy’s experiences had a basis in fact, a lot of the character’s experience was a bit atypical for the occupation.
“The role of a landman in our show is much more exciting than 99% of the work that landmen do in the real world,” he explained.
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In part, the difference results from Tommy’s role as an amalgamation of sorts.
“Billy’s character, Tommy, he’s really kind of a Swiss army knife of roles at M-Tex, so he’s doing a lot of different jobs that a traditional landman probably wouldn’t do,” he said. “That’s part of how we wanted to show so much of the industry and the patch and being out there.”
That diversity of experience was a must for Wallace and co-creator Taylor Sheridan. “We needed Tommy’s character to be able to go and do all these different things,” he details, “otherwise, he’d be on his computer looking for leases and doing regulatory compliance things, and nobody is going to watch a show about that.”
Landman has proven wildly popular despite the lack of paperwork. You can catch the season finale January 12, 2025 on Paramount+.
