Taylor Sheridan Playing With Risky Boundaries on ‘Landman’ Is Creating Cracks in His Million Dollar TV Empire
- Taylor Sheridan is widely for his work as a scriptwriter on projects like Sicario and Yellowstone.
- Sheridan's portrayal of the female characters in Landman is not sitting too well with the audiences.
- The Hell or High Water scribe needs to keep the building of his female characters in check to avoid further controversy.
Taylor Sheridan seems to be playing with fire these days as he continues to draw criticism from fans. He is pushing the boundaries of his TV show Landman by showing content that is getting further and further from a family show and the viewers are finding it hard to ignore it anymore.
Landman is a departure from the neo-Western genre that Sheridan has aced in the past decade, but it is still along the same vein as his hit TV show Yellowstone. Even so, fans love everything that it has to offer except the over-sexualization of the two recurring female characters which is getting out of hand.
Taylor Sheridan’s controversial take on Landman might not end well for the reputation he has built
Taylor Sheridan tried his hand at acting and appeared as recurring characters in several TV shows like Walker, Veronica Mars, and Sons of Anarchy. It was not until he was 40 that he made his transition into screenwriting and this was when he earned huge recognition in the industry.
His first screenwriting project was Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, which earned him a Writers Guild of America award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The next project he wrote the script for was Hell or High Water, which also earned several award nominations. In 2018, he created the show Yellowstone, which barely needs any introduction considering how popular it is.
However, things have started to go downhill for Sheridan now as the writing of the series Landman is coming off as a little sloppy concerning the father-daughter relationship between Billy Bob Thornton’s Tommy Norris and his 17-year-old daughter Ainsley Norris, portrayed by Michelle Randolph.
A Redditor raised the concern in very clear terms as they pointed out that for an adolescent teen, the character of Ainsley has been portrayed in such a way that it is making Sheridan look like a villain. Although Randolph is 27 in real life, it has to be kept in mind that in the show she is portraying someone much younger, and the over-sexualization of an adolescent on TV is far below Sheridan’s reputation.
In fact, even Ainsley’s mother and Tommy’s ex-wife, Angela Norris (Ali Larter) is seen wearing very revealing low-cut or see-through clothing. Not to mention Demi Moore’s Cami Miller, Tommy’s friend has a poorly-written character arc. With actresses as good as Larter and Moore, one would hope that there would be much more to their characters than their clothes and looks.
Fans are calling out Landman‘s poor portrayal of the female characters
Set in the oilfields of West Texas, Landman‘s primary focus is how many rich and powerful people are trying to benefit from the oil rigging industry. Although Tommy’s character is not exactly that of a landman, it is interesting enough to keep the audience interested despite killing off characters in rather stupid ways.
Sheridan’s fans would tolerate all that in the name of entertainment. However, they understood that a line has to be drawn when it comes to the series deliberately showing female characters that have the potential to be strong but are sexualized. Here is what some of them had to say:
Hopefully, the backlash on this show will keep Sheridan from writing such characters in his next projects unless he wants to alienate the larger audience with a somewhat perverted take on the female characters. Although fictional, this show has every chance to feature strong female characters which the audience would find much more impressive than this.
Landman is available for streaming on Paramount+.
