Summary
“Hell Has a Front Yard” is a pretty laidback episode of Landman, content for very little of note to happen. Instead, it’s a mood piece, letting the setting and characters bed in for the inevitable drama to come.
Taylor Sheridan shows have a tendency to fall in love with themselves, and Landman might be there already. Episode 3, “Hell Has a Front Yard”, has the general demeanour of someone sunning themselves by a pool, which is fitting since two key characters spend almost the entirety of it doing that. Stuff’s happening in several interconnected narrative strands, but it’s not happening in any hurry. And I’m here to tell you that this is totally fine.
Sheridan tells stories about things that matter to him — people, places, lifestyles. You always get the sense that he expects everyone else to care about these things as much as he does, and because his stuff is generally very well made, by the end of it you tend to. We’re not at the end of Landman — quite the contrary, actually — but we get, more or less, what makes Tommy Norris tick. We appreciate that he appreciates how big of a deal this oil business is. “Hell Has a Front Yard” lets us sit with him and his family while he tries to figure out what he’s going to do about it.
In the few scenes we spend with Monty Miller here, we’re reminded that Tommy will do something, especially since he’s quickly becoming the ideal scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong in the span of two episodes. When it comes to a choice between losing a considerable amount of money and letting even a valued employee hang, for an oil executive that’s no choice at all. Every big natural gas CEO has a Tommy. He can always be replaced by another.
Tommy would prefer this didn’t happen, but he has more pressing problems in Landman Episode 3 — namely, his ex-wife, Angela, who spent most of the premiere trying to seduce him via FaceTime and arrives in town here to do the same in person. This relationship is fascinating because they both clearly want to be with each other and equally clearly can’t stand each other. Angela is trapped in a marriage of convenience to some rich idiot because Tommy has always — and continues to — put his job first. She drinks. She flaunts her insane bikini body. And she throws herself at Tommy all the time because she’s pining for a marriage that was probably never feasible in the first place.
How does Ainsley fit into all this? For the most part she spends the episode lamenting the end of her relationship with Dakota and taking provocative selfies, but when she and Angela pass out after spending all day drinking tequila, she wakes up with a bit more clarity. She wants to stay with Tommy. To her — she doesn’t say this, but I’m reading between the lines — Angela is like the ghost of Christmas future. However determinedly Ali Larter might be defying the natural aging process — she is, rather improbably, 48 years of age — that bikini bod won’t last forever.
Billy Bob Thornton in Landman | Image via Paramount+
Tommy thinks his daughter wants to get to know him, and that’s a sad admission given she hasn’t managed to in the last 17 years. But you can see how he got here. Even in this episode, he leaves the ladies by the pool so he can take Rebecca Falcone to the accident site, which is pretty important since she’s a liability attorney who clearly fancies Tommy as being culpable for what happened. He needs to get on her good side, which proves almost impossible given the age gap, cultural differences, and general cross-purposes. She even turns her nose up at his music.
It’s very fitting of Taylor Sheridan that there’s a random rattlesnake scene here just one week after the random rattlesnake scene in Yellowstone. Cutting off the reptile’s head might have been the right thing to do, but it didn’t seem like that endeared Tommy to Rebecca either. He’s going to have his work cut out.
Speaking of which, Cooper isn’t faring especially well after being the sole survivor of a workplace accident that killed his entire crew, especially when the cousins of the dead workers jump him outside his trailer. Luckily Cooper wrestled in college and makes both of them look rather foolish, but that isn’t the end of it. Cooper starts working under Boss (Mustafa Speaks), alongside the same guys, one of whom holds a knife to his ribs in the truck and promises to kill him if he ever cuddles up to his cousin again.
To be fair, Cooper did do that when he visited the family home to pay his respects to Armando and the others. Ariana is clearly going to be a love interest for him, which seems ill-advised given the friction that already exists between Cooper and the rest of her family, but he seems like someone who makes a habit of walking headlong into trouble. He isn’t the only one.
