Yellowtone, Lioness, and Landman

Reviewing Taylor Sheridan

Photo by Colton Jones on Unsplash

Yellowstone (2018-2024), Landman (2024), and Lioness (2023-2024), written or co-written and either directed or overseen by Taylor Sheridan. These three series encompass 79 episodes over seven years of which I have seen about 50. I can’t do an exhaustive review of this much material, so I will do a general review of Sheridan’s work starting with Yellowstone, though he wrote earlier scripts that were prologues to these. His language is literary and existential enough for it to belong in a canon with the plays of the likes of Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams, bodies of work that would require a book each.

Yellowstone is a modern Western. Landman is the de facto sequel to Yellowstone in a form that might naturally follow a neo-Western. There is no official name for it. It is still a “Western,” but oil wells replace cattle, oilmen and landmen replace ranch owners and cowboys, drug cartels replace First Nation shamans, sweat lodges, and casinos, and Billy Bob Thornton replaces Kevin Costner as the lead character.

By contrast, Lioness is about post-modern warfare and its special ops, drawing loosely on Clair Danes’ Homeland and U.S. engagements in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, and the Emirates. In Lioness, women warriors and spies replace men in the highest-risk ops. Lioness also resembles fifties spy dramas that were set, often behind the Iron Curtain. Given the odds of the women surviving their Lioness missions delegated by Kaitlin Meade (Nicole Kidman), are well beyond Mission: Impossible!, more like Missions: Unthinkable!—Missions: Absurd! And though they have male allies, the lionesses do the hard lifting. Zoe Saldana playing Joe McNamara replaces Peter Graves as Jim Phelps; her Cinnamon and Barney lionesses are closer to Superwoman and Batgirl than human spies in terms of their training, their missions, and the feats required of them. In fact, Lioness’ first season opens with a “lioness” being terminated from the air as she is about to be captured on the ground. The lionesses agree that keeping the operations secret is more important than their lives.

At the close of the season, ex-Marine Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira) manages to complete her mission in Mallorca, executing not only her target, Asmar Ali Amrohi (Bassem Youssef), a billionaire funding terrorists, but Ehsan Al Rashdi (Ray Corasani), a member of the Saudi royal family and the fiancé of Aaliyah Amrohi (Stephanie Nur), moments after he discovered her identity by photo recognition software. While Asmar is an old man and no match for her, Ehsan makes the fatal mistake of assuming that because she is a woman he can handle her. From her lioness training, she is more than a match for any man.

Cruz, who joined the Marines and then lionesses to escape an abusive relationship in Oklahoma, has also become the lover of Aaliyah, the woman she was assigned to handle or shadow as the daughter of her eventual target, picking her up in the third episode at a party in Chesapeake, Maryland, by playing dumb so effectively that Aaliyah adopts her as a best friend and, soon, a surrogate sister.

Hence she has killed her love rival, the man Aaliyah is arranged to marry though doesn’t love in the way she loves Cruz. Yet it is an act of violence against Aaliyah because Aaliyah believes in the system she is trapped in.

After completing the mission, Cruz escapes her pursuers and dives into the water where she is rescued at the pickup point. She immediately assaults Joe and quits the lionesses, screaming that her mission was unethical, for she has killed an old man in his kitchen and her lover’s fiancé, betraying Aaliyah doubly and turning their real relationship into a strategic fabulism forever in the mind of grief-sticken Aaliyah.

A major subplot involves the lives of Joe’s husband, Neal McNamara (Dave Annable), a pediatric oncology surgeon, and daughter Kate McNamara (Hannah Love Lanier) who, in the extended absences of her mother, goes wilding and gets herself pregnant and almost killed in a car crash that kills her best friend. The pregnancy is discovered in the hospital after the crash.

After Kate and Joe, daughter and mother, reconcile, Kate feels that she can ask her about her next mission. She wonders if her mother might get killed. “Yes,” Joe says. Then Kate asks if she will kill anyone. Joe says, “You know I can’t answer that.” Kate says, “You just did.”

In Yellowstone and Landman, Sheridan works similar themes in different contexts and landscapes. The series present parallel crises and romances, but the 53 episodes of Yellowstone thus far dwarf the 10 of Landmen such that the same sequences in Landmen are more condensed, hence more intense, but then the oilfields of Texas and modernity are themselves more condensed, though not more intense, than the cattle ranches of Montana.

Yellowstone and Landman equally highlight Sheridan’s theme of environmental degradation and human self-destruction and ecological suicide in contemporary settings, though the apocalypse seems less imminent in Yellowstone because Montana is more removed from the political and petroleum-extraction arena than Texas, but it is an extension of the same landscape—the throwback modernity of the ranch or the futuristic modernity of the oilfield.

Sheridan couples the two and gives viewers a map of how you get from one to the other by sending the perennially challenged Jimmie Hudstrom (Jefferson White) to Texas to learn old-fashioned cowboying. When Jimmie gets there, it’s not just the food and cowboy tasks that he has trouble understanding; it’s the language.

Sheridan could have chosen any of a number of roles for himself in Yellowstone, but he picked that of Travis, the rodeo cowboy who drives Jimmie to Texas. That allows Sheridan to speak his own lines about the metamorphosis being asked of Jimmie. The destination is not just Texas; it is “shut up,” “fuck you,” and “no, you can’t share driving with this much money in equipment and horses; and I’ll have plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead.” (I’m not quoting exactly here, plus I assume that an actual rodeo cowboy served as stuntman for Travis when stopping horses on a dime and confronting bulls.)

As a neo-Western, Yellowstone is populated by four major animals that share its landscape with humans: horses, cattle, bulls, and buffalo. In fact, the animals dominate in terms of sheer numbers and the degree to which they provide the sole focus for human endeavor, though their activities are organized by the cowboys. I have often thought, take away the baseball, basketball, football, soccer ball, volleyball, etc., or puck, and the activity evaporates. Take away the four animals, and there is now ranch.

It is only late in the fourth season that John Dutton’s daughter Bethany (Beth) introduces tourism and catering to Yellowstone while Dutton himself introduces sponsoring rodeo cowboys like Travis to help support the Yellowstone Ranch by their earnings at events. Dutton is the lead played by Kevin Costner, while his daughter Beth is played by Irish actress Kelly Reilly.

Watching this series is somewhat more personal for my wife Lindy and me than most movies. I imagine that every viewer finds some degree of resonance to their own lives in every movie or series—synchronicity insures that. While I have never been to Montana and have no particular feeling about it, it figures strongly in Lindy’s background. Her father was raised in Red Lodge and went to college in Missoula before moving to Denver and marrying her mother during World War II. His sister’s family ran cattle feedlots in Texas through the rest of the century.

If my stepfather and my brother had watched Yellowstone with me in the fifties, we would have been stunned by the production values and language, to stay nothing of the rodeo, feats, sex, and violence, but we would have recognized the underlying themes: cattle, ranches, outlaws, showdowns, and singing cowboys (per Gene Autry and Roy Rogers).

The whole soundtrack of Yellowstone is a singing cowboy, letting Chris Stapledon, Whiskey Meyers, Willie Nelson, Mandolin Orange, Mary Gauthier, Honey County, Tim McGraw, Lainey Wilson, and Costner himself with the Modern West perform a continuous background as powerful as the foregroud. Costner is Yellowstone’s producer, plays star John Dutton, and sings as himself, not John Dutton—John Dutton doesn’t sing. Ryan Bingham (as Walker) is Yellowstone’s actual singing cowboy. Willie Nelson’s “Hands on the Wheel,” could have effectively closed any episode as well as the one it did. In fact, it fits the current news cycle from its early lyrics: “There’s deceivers, and believers, and old in-betweeners / That seem to have no place to go.”

Back to the 1950 my natal family was Hopalong Cassidy, and I find Jimmie Hudstrom to be homage to Pat Brady, intentionally or not. While Brady kicks his jeep in comic disgust, Jimmie tries to ride bucking broncos with more serious but still comedic results.

The ranch and rodeo are likewise revisioned from the fifties. As in Hopalong (a name that would never pass today) Cassidy, the bad guys are bad and shoot to kill, though the Dutton family leaves a lot more corpses than the combined work Hopalong, the Lone Ranger, and the Cisco Kid. Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) is a killing machine, yet somehow never dies in multiple many-machine-gun shootouts. When the Beck Brothers (Neil McDonough and Terry Serpico) kidnap his son Tate (Brecken Merrill) in season 2, he and John Dutton and ranch manager Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) shoot their way to his rescue, leaving a trail of corpses including the Becks. After Kayce becomes livestock commissioner, he is similarly quick to shoot first, leaving behind not only corpses but lawsuits and a political quagmire.

Subplots abound in Yellowstone. Some center around Kayce’s wife Monica, played by Kacey Asbille. Though Monica is Native American in the series, I don’t believe that Asbille is, though I’m not sure. The reservation that she comes from is represented by Thomas Rainwater, elected chief of the Confederated Tribes of Broken Rock and owner of the Painted Horse Casino, alternately John Dutton’s ally of convenience and most resolute foe, serves as Sheridan’s Native American voice, which is strongly traditional, sacred, and astutely strategic. Rainwater’s shamanic world-view balances John Dutton’s hardscrabble nihilist philosophy. I believe that Sheridan is receptive to both, as most of us have to be in the reality we are given. He portrays rodeos and roundups as authentically as sweat lodges and ceremonies.

While Kayce was a soldier in Afghanistan before returning to Montana, Monica is not only from Broken Rock but an intellectual who ends up teaching grade school, then Native American studies at Montana State in Bozeman. She is Sheridan’s voice of modern young First Nations women trapped between cultures and families—Kayce is not, of course, a Native American character.

An aspect of Yellowstone that becomes increasingly significant through the seasons is the role of John Dutton’s son Jamie (Wes Bentley), who is sent to Harvard Law School because he is deemed unsuited for ranch life. He represents the Dutton family’s legal interests and, when he becomes Montana’s Attorney General with John Dutton’s backing, he needs to provide his birth certificate and discovers that he was adopted. He tracks down his birth father Garrett Randall (Will Patton), a criminal at the time of Jamie’s birth and now living on a ranch.

Appearances are not what they seem. While Jamie has learned that Garrett killed his mother, it turned out that she was a drug-addicted prostitute who let the hungry baby suck on a crack pipe while she turned tricks.

When the Dutton family is attacked in a scheme to murder all of them at once, Jamie initially comes under suspicion. After he is cleared, Garrett comes under suspicion as the mastermind behind a grand plot that leads back to prison and long-time cellmates.

Another series of subplots involves Beth Dutton who is also Rip’s girlfriend and then his wife (though Rip has no actual identity or birthday, so can’t legally marry). They meet as teens (shown in flashbacks) after Rip arrives at the Dutton ranch, having killed his abusive father after failing to prevent him from killing his mother and brother. John Dutton finds him hiding in the barn and takes him on as a ranch hand. He ultimately becomes the Yellowstone ranch’s bruiser as well as John’s enforcer and bodyguard. Like all of Yellowstone’s employees and members, he is branded with a Y on his chest, signifying their lifelong allegiances and obligations, to the fictional ranch as characters and, metaphorically, to the show as actors.

Beth’s fierce, vulgar behavior, stretched to almost Trumpian buffoonery by Sheridan, spearheads the family’s fight against its enemies. She is inalterably loyal to her father and backs him even when he chooses to go against his own and her seeming interests. She is a hellion supreme and pushes especially male adversaries to their limits with her sexual innuendos and faux propositioning. Discussions of her character online point out how different she is from actress Reilly, in behavior as well as accent.

Beth hates her stepbrother Jamie because he is responsible for her being sterilized during a teen abortion—he chose not to take her to a clinic in Billings that would have done a straight abortion. Much of her rage is directed against him.

Since I have mentioned Trump, I will say that I have no indication as to Sheridan’s political feelings regarding MAGA, but he has prophetically written his shadow into Yellowstone. Within the ranch’s fictional kingdom he either doesn’t exist or is too peripheral to the show’s portrayal of America and democracy to risk including.

Yet another subplot centers around Carter, a 14-year-old whom Beth meets outside the hospital where her father John is being treated for gunshot wounds from the attempt on their lives. Carter’s father is dying of a heroin addiction, and Beth ends up semi-adopting Carter to Rip’s dismay. Yet Beth sees him as a young Rip, and he is gradually given more of a role at Yellowstone, his last chance (he is told) to make a place for himself in there world. As a natural thief and troublemaker, he almost blows the chance multiple times. Also known as Chubby or Boy, Carter is played by Australian actor Finn Little. His role gradually increases through the latter episodes.

There are many love affairs in Yellowstone, but one in particular is replicated in the key affair in Landman. Taylor Sheridan has, in effect, written the same characters into two different stories, adapting them to fit each one’s overall themes. Kayce’s relationship with Monica is different in virtually every regard from Cooper Norris’ relationship to Ariana Medina, but the couples are emotionally attuned and unattuned in similar ways, and the women in particular express the complexity and emotional depth of partnering.

While Kayce and Monica are married with a child, Cooper and Ariana are not only unmarried, but Ariana’s husband Elvio was killed during a pipe explosion while working on Cooper’s crew. Cooper’s later relationship with her is thrown into suspicion by its origins—that her husband died an accident that Cooper survived and now he is courting Elvio’s wife—except that he is not initially courting her; he is helping her out of honor and ethics, and responsibility. She is the one who is courting him. She has a child with Elvio, and she is due insurance money from the oil company, putting Cooper in the position of representing her interests against those of M-Tex, the company for which his father, Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) works as landman—operations manager on the oilfields and general gofer and fixer. M-Tex is owned by Monty Miller (played by John Hamm), who has a very long professional relationship with Tommy and depends on him to run his wells on side. Demi Moore has a thus far limited role as Cammi Miller, Monty’s wife, but as he has had yet another heart attack in the closing episodes and is seemingly on his death bed, her part increased with indications that she is being readied for a major role in a second season.

Cooper Norris is played by Tommy Lofland. Elvio Medina is played by Alejandro Akara, and Paulina Chavez plays his wife and then widow, Ariana, who, opposite Cooper, delivers Sheridan’s most powerful lover’s speech, mostly addressed to Billy Bob as Tommy as he questions his son’s and her relationship. Though the transcript is unannotated, I can give you a bit of a guide: The scene is initiated when Tommy arrives while Cooper and Ariana are preparing dinner. The key words are Ariana’s, and Tommy is her foil. Cooper is an observer to the witnessing of his own life by his two key figures. I have put a dot for my guess of change of speaker:

Yeah. Is Cooper here? Yeah. I'd like to talk to him, if you don't mind. •Uh, yeah, we're just about to have supper. Come in... •Oh, well, no. I-I don't want to interrupt. I can just... Uh, I can talk to him later. •No, please. •Uh, Cooper. •When a Mexican woman tells you to eat, the only answer is yes. •Oh. Okay. Thank you. (soft clattering) Okay. •Come on, eat. Use a bowl for the churipo. •Which one's that, hon? •That's good, that's good. Thank you. What's that deal? •Uh, it's a corunda. It's, like, a type of tamale. Just unwrap it. •Oh. So, uh... (clears throat ) I'd like to, uh... Ooh. ( coughing ) ( sniffles, coughs ) Sorry. Yeah, it takes some getting used to. •Bet it does. •I like hot stuff, don't get me wrong, but, boy, that's... sneak up on you. Mm. •That's how my grandma made it. (chuckles ) •Huh, yeah. (Tommy coughing) So, what is this... what-what are y'all up to? •She's scared here alone and I need somewhere to heal up... •No, no, no, no. Uh-uh. We're not doing that. We're telling the truth here. What is this? What are y'all doing? •Trying to figure it out. •Yeah? How's that going? [Note, faint echoes of Carmela Soprano and a psychotherapist unwilling to take blood money] •Little clumsy. •I'm not surprised. (sighs) •I know what you think this is. I'm scared. A widow with a baby and no future. And you're right, I am those things. But if I was looking for a man to take care of me, the 22-year-old worm on a work-over crew would not be my solution. (Contemplative music ) ♪ ♪ So I don't know what this is. Am I grieving? Am I avoiding it? Or did God show mercy on me and give me another love already? Elvio was funny, kind to me. He bought this house. Built a life. But Elvio never once looked at me the way he looks at me. Not once. Ever. It's every time he looks. And I like it. So what do I do with that? Your supper's over, too. Maybe we fall in love and last 50 years. Maybe next week I realize that I'm just hiding from this thing. Maybe I fall in love, and all he feels is guilt. So, like I said, it's clumsy. I'm gonna let it be. Thank you for stopping by. Judge me all you want from that truck, but I will not be judged in my own fսcking house. •Son, you might've outkicked your coverage on this one. (Tommy chuckling) Thank you for the food, hon. I can't think of one thing in the world that would be better than the two of you lasting for the next 50 years. And if it's not with him, I hope you find somebody. 'Cause you're one of the few that I've met that actually deserves it, okay?

As noted, the accident at the pipeline had only Cooper surviving while Elvio and the rest of Cooper’s got getting burned up horrifically like astronauts without a heat shield. That event is the center and crux of the first season of Landman. What follows are:

•Cooper’s relationship with Ariana.

•The other Mexicans and Elvio’s relatives led by, I think, Antonio (Octavio Rodriguez) beating Cooper almost to death.

•Tommy finding his son in that condition and attacking the instigators while bringing in the sheriff and police officers and informing the guilty men of their impending prison sentences for assault with intent to kill—“I’m gonna take thirty years of your life away from you; you fucked with the wrong hillbilly!

•Ariana’s outrage at the attack on Cooper, leading her to take him into her house to heal and embracing him more fully because, as she put it, the attack was not on her behalf, it was to claim her for Antonio.

•Cooper representing Ariana and the other widows of the men on his crew against M-Tex and Rebecca Falcone (Kayla Wallace), Monty’s causation lawyer, who is trying to limit the damages from the oilfield explosion. Here is a classic quote from Wallace:

“Do you think they hired me, 'cause I'm pretty? I charge $900 an hour, you asshole, and you're real close to learning why. So here's what you're going to do. You're gonna drop this bullshit claim. You, your client, and your insurance company are going to circle up and take your eight-figure settlement like men or I will sue this firm, your client, and your insurance company for defamation, slander, frivolous and malicious prosecution, intentional infliction of emotional distress, mental anguish, and anything else that can come up with. And when this is over in seven years, you will be disbarred and I will hang your law degrees over my fucking toilet.”

In the course of this drama of mixed and crisscrossing loyalties, Tommy delivers Sheridan’s most succinct view of the oil economy and why Landman follows Yellowstone in his cinematological archive. Rebecca, the attorney, opens the scene by commenting about a wind turbine:

Rebecca: God, they're massive.

Tommy: 400 feet tall. The concrete foundation covers a third of an acre and goes down into ground 12 feet. Who owns them? Oil companies. We use them to power the wells. No electricity out here. We're off the grid. They use clean energy to power the oil wells? They use alternative energy. There's nothing clean about this. Ah. Please, Mr. Oilman, tell me how the wind is bad for the environment. Tommy: Do you have any idea how much diesel they had to burn to mix that much concrete? Or make that steel and haul this shit out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that fucking thing? Or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won't offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don't get me started on solar panels and the lithium in your Tesla battery. And never mind the fact that, if the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow, we don't have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities. It'd take 30 years if we started tomorrow. And, unfortunately, for your grandkids, we have a 120-year, petroleum-based infrastructure. Our whole lives depend on it. And, hell, it's in everything. That road we came in on. The wheels on every car ever made, including yours. It's in tennis rackets and lipstick and refrigerators and antihistamines. Pretty much anything plastic. Your cell phone case, artificial heart valves. Any kind of clothing that's not made with animal or plant fibers. Soap, fucking hand lotion, garbage bags, fishing boats. You name it. Every fucking thing. And you know what the kicker is? We're gonna run out of it before we find its replacement. It's the thing that's gonna kill us all... as a species. No, the thing that's gonna kill us all is running out before we find an alternative. And believe me, if Exxon thought them fucking things right there were the future, they'd be putting them all over the goddamn place. Getting oil out of the ground's the most dangerous job in the world. We don't do it 'cause we like it. We do it 'cause we run out of options. And you're out here trying to find something to blame for the danger besides your boss. There ain't nobody to blame but the demand that we keep pumping it.

I said that the pipe explosion was the center of the Landman, but it would be more accurate to call it the sub-center. The real center is the initial spectaculr crash—episode 1—between an oil tanker and a cartel plane (how did they ever film it?) leading to an even more massive explosion than the one on the oilfield and a separate plot involving the cartel versus the oilmen. The plane-tanker collision results in:

•Many initial deaths and strewn bodies.

•A continued, escalating clash between Tommy representing Monte and M-Tex Oil and the international drug cartel represented locally by Jimenez (Alex Meraz).

•Tommy’s attempt to represent Monty’s interests to the cartel, and Jimenez’s pushing back. The men’s threats to each other’s enterprises and persons ricochet back and forth in a dangerous game of chicken.

•Monty’s enlisting the Texas National guard at Tommy’s request to give him leverage initially and then firepower when that proves insufficient. More cartel members die, but they are quickly replaced, and the cartel’s patience is stretched. They raise the ante and make more direct threats.

•Tommy is kidnapped by Jimenez, tortured, and about to be put to death when he is saved by a hail of bullets by Galino (Andy Garcia) a higher-up cartel member who doesn’t approve of Jimenez’s thug methods and imagines a better yield by a cooperation between oil and street drugs, which are at one level, Galino understands, the same thing: modernity’s two maine addictive opiates. Galino also saves a potential second season for Landman!

There is very little comic relief in Landman, but that part is handled mainly by the appearance of Tommy’s daughter Ainsely (Michelle Randolph) followed, a couple of episodes later, by his ex-wife Angela (Ali Larter) who, though married now to a wealthy guy in Ft. Worth, moves back in with him and restores their marriage. Ainsely, Cooper’s very different sister, is precociously and overtly sexual, provoking insult barrages bank and forth with her brother, and upsetting Tommy’s male housemates. Angela is also sex-positive, but she channels that into her resumption of a robust relationship with her ex-husband.

Ainsley eventually takes up with Ryder Sampson (Mitchell Slaggert), aspiring Heisman quarterback, starting a romance about which she is all too willing to blab freely to Tommy. He doesn’t want to hear a word of it, leading her to deduce that the romance is okay as long as she lies. The conclusion of the banter between them is that she will call her times with Ryder “bible studies,” and Tommy will accept this ruse while also quizzing Ryder and her about the particular parts of the bible they have been studying, putting both him and them in a catch-22 situation. Yes, comedy amid gunfire and explosions

Bored with Midland, Texas, Angela and Ainsely, while enlisting Ryder as their somewhat unwilling ally, invade a retirement home and take the residents out for fun, leading eventually to a strip show at which Ryder is the only candidate as a male stripper, so Ainsely makes a deal with him to get him to do it.

What makes the comedic parts work is the episodic nature of the series, so that profound matters are interspersed with Shakespearean peanut-gallery humor—at about the level of Nick Bottom given a donkey’s head by the mischievous Puck.

I’ll re-do this review when I’ve seen more of Yellowstone and Lioness.