Taylor Sheridan is currently one of TV’s busiest creatives, and while fans are waiting for Yellowstone’s final Season 5 episodes, he’s currently in the middle of filming his latest small screen effort, the oil boom drama Landman. Like his other shows, this one has a stacked cast, with Jon Hamm’s involvement revealed as the production kicked off in February. But maybe don’t expect a ton of other similarities to Sheridan’s more western fare.
Hamm has already made an impact on 2024 TV in different ways, from closing out Sheriff’s Roy Tillman’s arc in the acclaimed fifth season of FX’s Fargo to starring in and executive producing Fox’s animated comedy Grimsburg. But presumably before we see his Archangel Gabriel again in Good Omens’ third and final season, we’ll see him bringing Taylor Sheridan’s dialogue to the screen as Monty Miller in Landman, which will stream with a Paramount+ subscription. But he presumably won’t share much in common with the Duttons, as he explained to People what fans should expect from the Texas-set drama:
It's not actually cowboy-oriented at all. It's more in the world of oil. It's based on oil speculators and what they called landmen, which are the guys that run around and try to acquire mineral rights and land rights in the hope of speculating and finding oil. There's a lot of oil under the ground here in Texas and they are constantly trying to find it. . . . There are all the political things that come with that.
Jon Hamm confirmed that production on the series is already halfway over, which means the cameras might be done rolling on Landman by the end of April. Which is right when Yellowstone is expected to go back into production in Montana, squarely during the months where it's warmest and snow isn't an issue. (Though it's possible/likely that some of Season 5 could have been filmed at the 6666 ranch in Texas where Jimmy and Emily live.)
In any case, though Landman won't be a cowboy-esque drama in the most traditional respect, and will presumably showcase more cars than horses, the show does hold strong to a central theme of Taylor Sheridan's work: protecting and/or exploiting someone's land, from single properties to the titular cities where Mayor of Kingstown and Tulsa King are set.
Only in this story, which is based on the podcast Boomtown, it sounds like almost everyone is serving their own interests rather than trying to protect a legacy or keep the peace in any way. Billy Bob Thornton stars as an oil company's crisis executive, and Hamm as a longtime colleague, as well as one of Texas' oil field elite. And the way the Mad Men vet puts it, it also sounds like everything is going to get very testy indeed, as it goes when billions of dollars are at stake.
There's a lot of back and forth, a lot of intrigue and things like that. It's Taylor Sheridan and obviously it's very well written. It's very well-researched. It's a story very well told, and I think it's an interesting take on what happens when it comes to how we get the stuff that makes our cars and our lives and our planes and everything in our modern world go. … It's got Billy Bob Thornton and Demi Moore, so it's a tremendous cast and it's been super fun to work on. And obviously, Taylor Sheridan's in charge of everything, so it's a great project. It's a good story. People are going to enjoy it.
Hopefully Landman makes it through the rest of production without any snafus, so that Taylor Sheridan can shift back to closing out the Duttons’ current chapter before then bouncing to the 2024 spinoff and other upcoming Yellowstone shows in the pipeline. Both Landman and Yellowstone should be debuting on the 2024 TV schedule, but stay tuned for more details.
