From Mineral Rights to Michelob Ultra: Roughly 76 Things I’ve Learned From ‘Landman’
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Hello! In case you missed it, over at The Ringer I discussed everything I’ve learned about the petroleum industry over two wildly preposterous and diverting seasons of Landman. Have a taste:
Has there ever been a more didactic show in the history of television? In the third episode of the first season, Tommy Norris, the titular “Landman” played by Billy Bob Thornton, lays it all out. A white-shoe attorney, Rebecca Falcone (Kayla Wallace), has recently been hired to help the company that Tommy basically does everything for, M-Tex Oil, with pending litigation. She is from somewhere other than Texas, which makes her, by the show’s logic, definitionally something of a snowflake. (She is at one point seen wearing a Northwestern hat.) She has concerns about the energy industry—like, is it wrecking the environment? Wrong question.
Tommy, beyond indignant, responds in the following fashion:
“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 and pretty much anything, your cellphone case, artificial heart valves, any kind of clothing that isn’t made of animal or plant fibers, soap, fucking hand lotion, garbage bags, fishing boats, you name it. Every fucking thing.”
It’s an extraordinary monologue—one part David Mamet, one part David Simon, and one part press release from Halliburton. Tennis rackets? Garbage bags? Fishing boats? Fucking hand lotion? Jesus. I, for one, required no further persuasion. If dredging the depths of the earth is the only thing keeping me well-moisturized, then drill baby, drill. But that’s just scratching the surface rights of what I’ve learned. Now that the sun has set on the second season of Landman, let me tell you some other things.
Dive on in if that sounds like your cup of light beer!