All the Pretty Koch Suckers

There’s a moment in Season 1 of Landman that crystallizes everything. The oil company’s shareholders gather in their boardroom, high above the West Texas dust and blood. Someone mentions the inevitable: we need to transition away from fossil fuels and move toward sustainable energy. There’s a flicker of acknowledgment around the table. Everyone nods. They know. Then, as if the words were never spoken, the conversation simply returns to extraction, production, and quarterly targets. The brief moment of clarity vanishes as if it never occurred. The episode isn’t a failure of imagination. The result is perfect knowledge paired with absolute paralysis—and it’s the most honest thing you’ll see on television about where we are as a civilization.

Landman, created by Taylor Sheridan and streaming on Paramount+, stars Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris, a crisis manager (the “landman”) for a Texas oil company navigating the daily catastrophes of the patch—worker deaths, cartel violence, regulatory nightmares, and family dysfunction. Jon Hamm plays his CEO boss in Season 1, running the empire with ruthless efficiency until his death at season’s end. Demi Moore, playing his widow, inherits not just the company but the accumulated complications of her husband’s corner-cutting and crisis management. Though formidable in her own right, she finds herself dependent on Tommy to navigate the minefield her late husband left behind—a dynamic that reveals how even power at the top remains tethered to those who manage the violence of extraction on the ground.

Both Thornton and Moore, at the twilight of their careers, bring weathered authenticity to roles about people who’ve survived by compromise and can’t imagine another way to live. Season 2 introduces Sam Elliott as Tommy’s estranged father, living out his final days in a rest home after the death of Tommy’s mother—a woman neither man misses. Their reconciliation, pushed by Tommy’s wife, unfolds with the spare poetry Elliott brings to everything. In one sunset scene, father and son sit together, both confessing they’re “totally worn out emotionally.” It’s unclear whether they mean by each other, by oil, or by the whole exhausting project of American manhood—probably all three.

Ali Larter plays Tommy’s current wife, younger and eager to please in ways that become their form of extraction comedy. The ensemble includes strong repertory work throughout, including an oil manager perpetually distracted by Tommy’s daughter, Ainsley (played by Michelle Randolph, who understands exactly what power her underwear-clad presence wields in a man’s world built on desire and petroleum). The younger generation gets their own tragic education. Tommy’s son is in love with a Latina woman who wants something oil money can’t buy: simplicity, locality, mutual presence without ambition’s corrosion. When she inherits wealth, he faces the series’ central question in miniature: does he follow the money or stay with the love? It’s the same choice civilization faces in that boardroom—and we already know how that story ends.

The Addiction Economy: Beyond Metaphor

Landman isn’t using addiction as a metaphor—it’s literal. Civilization is physiologically dependent on oil, and the show understands its subject matter isn’t about villains or ignorance. Everyone in that boardroom knows we’re destroying ourselves. The knowledge changes nothing because there is no “outside” from which to leverage change. The system cannot imagine its negation because it would require imagining a world it has no language or infrastructure to conceive.

This is what distinguishes Landman from typical environmental drama. There are no heroes planning the great transition, no innovators with clean-tech solutions waiting in the wings. There’s only the daily management of catastrophe, the constant calculation of acceptable losses, and the paperwork that transforms death into operating costs. When workers die—and they die regularly—the response isn’t horror but procedure. Settlements. Non-disclosure agreements. The bereaved are absorbed back into the machinery that killed their loved ones because there is no other economy to turn to and no other way to feed families in West Texas.

The show depicts terminal-stage capitalism with clear eyes: perfect awareness, zero exit. We know we’re going down, and we’re still drilling. That boardroom scene isn’t a turning point—it’s an epitaph.

Erotic Extraction: When Sex Becomes Oil Metaphor

In one darkly comic scene, Tommy’s wife performs oral sex on him while he drives, her enthusiasm so overzealous he has to remind her—mid-act—that teeth aren’t part of the extraction process. It’s played as comedy: the eager wife, the exasperated husband trying to drive, and the mechanical language applied to intimacy. But the metaphor cuts deeper than the joke. Her desire to please could literally damage “the rig.”

This is fossil fuel capitalism’s psychosexual id laid bare: extraction as pleasure, production as virility, and the constant risk that enthusiasm will destroy the mechanism. Even intimacy is filtered through the language of petroleum—terms like “the rig” and “extraction” reflect how industrial processes colonize the language of bodies. And like that boardroom conversation that can’t sustain talk of alternatives, even marital sex can’t escape oil’s totalizing logic. Everything becomes about production, damage control, and keeping the machinery functional despite human messiness.

The sexuality throughout Landman isn’t incidental decoration—it’s about power, dependence, and the erotics of dominance that mirror extraction itself. Tommy’s daughter weaponizes her body in an industry that objectifies women as ruthlessly as it drills the earth. Demi Moore’s character inherits power but remains dependent on Tommy’s knowledge of how to manage violence. Even Tommy’s son’s relationship—the one thing that seems to exist outside oil’s logic—gets tested when money enters the equation, when love has to compete with the seductive promise of wealth that oil represents.

The comedy is that Tommy’s literally trying not to crash the truck during that scene. The tragedy is that we’re all in that truck, and the crash is inevitable whether she uses teeth or not.

Death as Operating Cost, Laughter as Last Resort

Landman treats mortality not as a tragedy but as a spreadsheet reality. Workers die in explosions, accidents, and cartel violence. The response is never “How do we stop this?” but “How do we manage this?” The show’s dark humor doesn’t soften these deaths—it exposes how normalized they’ve become. When you know the industry kills people and you keep working in it, keep profiting from it, and keep your family fed by it, what’s left but gallows humor?

This is where the show’s melancholy becomes profound. That exhaustion Sam Elliott articulates—”totally worn out emotionally”—isn’t just about family estrangement. It’s about living inside a system you know is killing you, killing others, and killing the future, and being unable to step outside it. Tommy and his father, two generations of American men, have given everything to extraction—emotional availability, family connection, moral certainty—and they have nothing left but that shared sunset and the acknowledgment that they’re empty.

The show’s comedy works because it’s the only appropriate response to apocalypse-in-progress. You laugh because crying won’t stop the derricks from pumping. You may jest about teeth and rigs because the alternative is facing the reality that you are complicit in something you are unable to cease. The melancholy seeps in during the quiet moments—those sunsets, those drives across empty land, those silences between people who’ve run out of things to say because they’ve run out of futures to imagine.

Landman refuses to offer hope not out of nihilism but out of honesty. It shows us people who are clear-eyed about doom and paralyzed by that clarity. They’re not stupid. They’re not evil. They’re trapped in a system that feeds them while devouring everything, including themselves.

The Dinosaurs’ Last Laugh

After that boardroom scene, after all the sexy melancholy and profitable death, here’s where we land: scientists now tell us that every living organism on Earth contains microplastics. Blood, tissue, organs, breast milk—all of it infiltrated by petroleum’s descendants. The dinosaurs, it turns out, are having the last laugh. We dug them up, burned them, reshaped them into everything we touch, and now they’re returning the favor—remaking us from the inside out.

We are the latest dinosaurs, and we’re taking ourselves down with the same substance we couldn’t stop extracting. Landman understands the problem perfectly: that boardroom conversation that slides from sustainability back to production isn’t a failure of imagination. It’s a recognition that we’ve already crossed the threshold.

We’re not deciding whether to go down with oil. We’re already composed of it.

Remember when the Arctic started thawing? Those of us on the left expected horror, a global emergency, and immediate action. Instead, Big Oil and the Pentagon started rubbing their hands together. Mainstream media dutifully reported the good news: there is plenty of oil beneath the icebergs, which have become newly accessible due to the climate catastrophe caused by burning oil. The feedback loop doesn’t horrify the system—it excites it. Melting ice caps aren’t warnings; they’re opportunities. New shipping routes. New drilling sites. The consequences of extraction itself open up new possibilities for extraction.

We just don’t get it. Or rather, we get it intellectually but can’t emotionally process a system so fundamentally committed to its acceleration that the apocalypse becomes a business opportunity. Landman gets it. The show doesn’t flinch from depicting a world where every crisis generates new profit vectors, where every disaster creates new management opportunities for people like Tommy, and where even collapse becomes another quarterly earnings call.

This trend isn’t new. Greg Palast’s investigative documentary on the Koch Brothers reveals how America’s most powerful political influencers built their oil billions by siphoning petroleum from outside Indian reservation boundaries—the same basic theft Martin Scorsese dramatized in Killers of the Flower Moon, just with lawyers and property line technicalities instead of outright murder. Though the Osage got bullets and the later victims got legal briefs, the extraction remained constant. Those Koch billions later funded Citizens United, the legislation that opened the floodgates of corporate money into American politics, effectively purchasing democracy itself with wealth stolen from Native land via oil. How about that?!

Landman makes this state-corporate merger explicit. In Season 1, when Tommy is kidnapped by a Mexican cartel demanding oil land for drug-running airstrips, the cartel discovers too late what real power looks like. Tommy makes a single phone call, and the U.S. military arrives to obliterate them. Not the police. Not the DEA. The military—acting as private security for petroleum interests—blurs the line between state violence and corporate protection. The cartel thought they were negotiating with a businessman. They were actually threatening an arm of the American empire. This is what the Koch billions purchased: a system where oil doesn’t just influence government—oil is government, and challenging extraction means facing the full force of military annihilation.

The through-line is perfect: steal oil from Indigenous people, convert it to political power, use that power to ensure no one can stop the stealing, and deploy state military force to protect private extraction. Landman portrays the contemporary end-stage of this system, where the theft has become so normalized, so total, that it doesn’t even require the pretense of separation between corporate interest and state violence anymore—just a phone call from a landman to unleash helicopter gunships.

The ship isn’t sinking—we are the ship, and we’re made of the very thing that’s drowning us. Tommy’s son might choose love over money, but he’ll make that choice with microplastics in his bloodstream. Demi Moore’s character might run the company differently than her husband, but she’ll still depend on the violence Tommy manages in the field. That reconciliation between father and son happens in the shadow of the rest home, both men worn out by systems neither could escape. Even the moments of genuine human connection occur inside petroleum’s totalizing embrace.

The show’s refusal to offer solutions isn’t cruelty—it’s respect for the audience’s intelligence. We’re past the point where one good CEO, one moral landman, or one choice for love over money changes the trajectory. We’re in that boardroom, watching the conversation return to extraction even as we acknowledge it’s killing us. We’re in that truck, hurtling forward with teeth at the rig. We’re in that rest home, exhausted, watching the sunset over land we’ve hollowed out. We’re watching the Arctic melt and calculating how much oil it reveals. We’re watching the military vaporize anyone who threatens the flow.

Landman is funny and melancholy and sexy and deadly because that’s what it feels like to live in a terminal-stage fossil fuel civilization. We know. And we’re still pumping. The dinosaurs are inside us now, and they’re not leaving until we do. We can see them with our mind’s eye, last-laughing like Sharkey’s toothy grin, all those pearly whites.

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