How Accurate Is Billy Bob Thornton's Landman? It's Complicated

"Landman" is more unmissable drama from the modern-day TV king, Taylor Sheridan, whose numerous shows all seem to hit. Billy Bob Thornton playing a shrewd, foul-mouthed wildcatter who's as quick with a wisecrack as he is adept at navigating high-intensity negotiations over land was always going to be a recipe for success. But that's not all the show has working in its favor.

For one thing, there are several moments where Thornton's Tommy Norris delivers long monologues on the necessity of oil and the shortcomings of renewable energy, which will likely appeal to the show's middle-American audience. That said, we probably shouldn't take too seriously the show wherein Thornton argues about having paella for dinner one minute and is kidnapped by the cartel the next. This is a series, after all, that spent a lot of time on a strip show for seniors, before which one of the elderly nursing home patients laments the fact that it had been a long time since she'd had a "d*** in her face." In other words, getting your facts from Sheridan's latest melodrama probably isn't the most sound approach to the issues of the day.

That said, the oil drama is notable for being accurate in terms of its depiction of certain aspects of life on an oil rig. "Landman" is based on a podcast that hardcore fans of the series should check out, which chronicled the oil boom in West Texas and saw its creator, Christian Wallace (who also co-created "Landman" with Sheridan), spend a year working in the Texas oil fields. As such, the Paramount+ drama was always going to have a significant level of realism when it came to the industry around which it's based. The question is, just how accurate is "Landman" really?

"Landman" is hugely successful, much to the delight of star Billy Bob Thornton. But accurate? That's debatable. Several significant moments from the series address the very real issue of climate change and fossil fuels, the first and most memorable of which comes in season 1. Here, Tommy Norris tells Kayla Wallace's lawyer, Rebecca Falcone, that the idea of wind towers being "clean energy" is nonsense. 

After explaining that oil companies use wind towers to power oil wells, Norris says "there's nothing clean about this," adding, "In its 20-year lifespan, [the wind tower] won't offset the carbon footprint of making it." Cowboy State Daily spoke to real-life Wyoming Landman Steve Degenfelder, who commented on Norris' wind tower monologue."That is extremely accurate," Degenfelder said. "And I hope the public can distinguish some of the sensational things from the accurate things."

However, a life-cycle analysis of two wind turbines found quite the opposite. A 2012 study published in the journal Renewable Energy found wind energy was among the cleanest sources of energy available, which is backed up by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which found that onshore wind power produced the smallest amount of emissions over its lifetime. The Renewable Energy study also showed that the manufacturing phase of a wind tower did require significant energy, but that it would take a maximum of seven months for that energy to be offset. A 2016 study in the Journal of Fundamentals of Renewable Energy and Applications similarly looked at 14 wind turbines and found that turbines with a 3.4-megawatt output offset the carbon emissions used to build them in 64 days. Those with a 100-kilowatt output offset the manufacturing emissions for 354 days. Newsweek collected further research that yielded similar results.

Matt Toohey, land manager at Forge Energy III in San Antonio, Texas, spoke to Business Insider about "Landman" and said it "shines in understanding the lingo of the business, and depicting the landman as the company middleman." According to Toohey, Tommy Norris sharing a house with his lawyer and oil engineer is also not an uncommon occurrence. Still, the real-life oil man also highlighted inaccuracies. "Any of the situations where Billy Bob Thornton's character is operating the well are totally erroneous," he said.

"Landman" co-creator Christian Wallace (who wants two "1883" stars to join the series) has spoken about accuracy issues, telling Deadline, "A lot of it is very accurate," while admitting that "it depends on who you ask." He highlighted real-life scenarios he witnessed while working on his podcast, "Boomtown" (not to be confused with "Superman" star Rachel Brosnahan's oil drama of the same name), including the deaths on oil rigs. "Those are things that really happened," he said, pointing to a scene in season 1 in which an oil worker is crushed to death by pipes. "We went deep into some of the oil field accidents and safety," Wallace explained. "Some of the scenes are directly from that, such as the pipe-crushing scene. That's a real story that I heard from my uncle growing up." Still, Wallace acknowledged that "the role of a landman in our show is much more exciting than 99% of the work that landmen do in the real world."

Then, there's the cartel, which, according to Wallace, is "a real issue as far as the drug trafficking through that region." But Toohey told Business Insider, "I found the scenes with the cartel interesting, even though they were an extreme exaggeration. We do deal, though, with all sorts of owners."