Everybody watched the Landman land

It never pays to bet against Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan (including in a “Which minor Sons Of Anarchy cast member will end up owning like half of cable television 15 years later?” contest; take that, Theo Rossi). Now, Sheridan has a brand new hit on his hands courtesy of his new Billy Bob Thornton series Landman, which is doing massive numbers despite being called Landman, an objectively terrible name for a television program.

Paramount+ went so far as to issue a press release to crow about the numbers the show pulled in with its two-episode premiere this past weekend, announcing that 5.2 million viewers tuned in to watch Thornton Man the Land. That makes the series, set in present day Texas, one of the biggest launches in the streamer’s history, slotting in nicely with Tulsa King and 1923, which were, of course, also created by Sheridan. (Do you think Paramount executives ever sit around telling each other ghost stories about an alternate universe where their one-man TV factory decided to spend another couple of seasons as an ineffectual sheriff’s deputy on Sons Of Anarchy?) The upshot of it all is that Landman is a hit, and if it sounds like we’re trying to repeatedly say the name of the show until it stops sounding stupid to us—we know it’s a technical term for the guys who work for oil companies, searching out mineral rights on land, but still—well, hell, you caught us. Landman. Land comma Man. Billy Bob Thornton? Oh, he’s the Landman.

Nope.

Admittedly, Landman did get a bit of a boost from Sheridan’s own TV output: The show’s premiere arrived right after the second episode of the last part of Yellowstone‘s final season, presumably priming viewers to be in the mood for land and the manning thereof. Actual reviews for the show have been middling, although Thornton himself has come in for praise for giving an expectedly confident, funny performance as an oil company fixer.