By Catherine Austin Fitts

I am an unabashed Taylor Sheridan fan. As writer, producer, director, and actor, Sheridan created the powerful Yellowstone series—Solari’s pick for Movie of the Year 2019—which generated the memorable line, “What are we going to do about the Beck brothers?”

We have selected a second Sheridan series, Landman (November 2024–present), as our Movie of the Year 2024. In Landman, Sheridan applies the same bluntly honest yet nuanced lens to the Texas oil industry—and what it reveals about modern energy debates—that he used to elucidate land grab issues in Yellowstone.

Lead character Tommy Norris (played by the excellent Billy Bob Thornton) is an oil company “landman,” a job that involves “negotiat[ing] leases with landowners, serv[ing] as the go-between for the working men and the big boss, and [acting as] a ‘fixer’ for whatever emergency arises.”

Those emergencies even include facing off with Mexican drug cartel members. In an early moment of dialogue that hints eerily at the invisible weaponry that the syndicate in charge of Israel used to assassinate key members of Iran’s political class (and their families and neighbors) in June 2025, Tommy (while tied to a chair with a bag over his head) tells a cartel member that the cartel’s objections to his oil company’s operations are in vain:

“[F]irst they’ll hire Halliburton to build files on you f***ing a**holes that the FBI only dreams about having. Then they’ll send 30 Tier 1 operators from Triple Canopy [a private military company], and they’ll bust you like a f***ing piñata. And if any of you dips***s make it back to Mexico, they’ll blow your f***ing house up with a drone. With your family in it.”

One of Sheridan’s fortes as a writer is his ability to puncture the simplistic arguments that keep people trapped in black-and-white thinking. In Landman, as in Yellowstone, the characters who adopt holier-than-thou attitudes about things like meat-eating or use of “fossil fuels” get a deep education on the difference between reality and sanctimony. The real deal has never been as entertaining as when Sheridan dishes it out—be prepared to laugh until you cry.