Taylor Sheridan’s Landman turned the oil business into a rugged, high-stakes drama and established itself as one of the strongest Western-flavored series outside the Yellowstone universe. Centered on Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) as he tries to keep his employer’s drilling operation ahead of rivals, the Paramount+ show carries Sheridan’s signature grit. It also rests on a deeper claim to authenticity than many workplace dramas can make—because one of its co-creators lived the industry before he wrote it.

Christian Wallace, a former oil roughneck who partnered with Sheridan on the series, has been clear about the production’s priorities. Speaking to Variety, he said the team aims to “get as close to the real deal as we can. We use real drilling rigs, real roughnecks. That stuff is as authentic as we can possibly make it.”

For viewers new to the terminology, roughnecks are the hands-on workers on a drilling rig—the people who handle the heavy equipment, including the drill itself. Putting actual roughnecks and working hardware on camera is part of how Landman tries to feel lived-in rather than merely researched.

Shortcuts for the Audience

Wallace was equally frank that pure accuracy sometimes has to yield to clarity. The writers and filmmakers use “shortcuts” so that a general audience can follow what is happening in a scene, even when a detail would not satisfy a specialist.

“So the oil and gas guy may be like, ‘Wait, what type of gauge are you talking about right there?’” he said. “But it’s just a storytelling device.”

That distinction matters. Wallace is not claiming every technical line would pass an industry audit. He is claiming that the physical world of the show—the rigs, the labor, the texture of the work—is rooted in reality, while certain explanations are simplified so the drama can move.

His authority on the subject predates the series. Before co-creating Landman with Sheridan, Wallace produced the Boomtown podcast about the oil industry. He knows the difference between a process that looks right on screen and one that would actually hold up on a lease in West Texas.

Why Pure Realism Would Empty the Room

Real life, Wallace noted, is rarely as watchable as a Sheridan series. If Landman depicted a landman’s job with documentary fidelity, much of Tommy Norris’s screen time would be spent pulling files and searching databases.

“If we actually showed just what a landman did, which is basically pull files and look things up on a computer, nobody would watch that show,” Wallace joked. “It’d be very, very boring.”

Sheridan’s strength has long been balancing procedural texture with action and personal stakes. Wallace said he learned where to “compromise” on the line between fact and fiction so that episodes stay packed without abandoning the industry’s essential character. The goal is not a training film. It is a drama that still respects the world it portrays.

Cartels, Planes, and Kernels of Truth

Some of the show’s most heightened material involves Tommy’s dealings with the Gallino Cartel in Season 1. Wallace was amused by how far that material sits from ordinary landman life. “I’ve never met a landman who’s had a bag put over his head and got pistol-whipped,” he said.

Even there, he argued, the writers planted “kernels of the truth.” In the Season 1 premiere, the cartel lands a small plane on a road—an image that might look like pure thriller invention. Wallace said it was drawn from a real episode in Texas Rangers history: cartels using extremely rural West Texas roads as improvised airstrips to offload cargo, until the Rangers staged an ambush one night. “So there are elements of it.”

That approach—taking a documented tactic or incident and heightening the danger around a fictional protagonist—runs through much of Sheridan’s work. Landman applies it to an industry Wallace knows from the inside.

Authenticity With a Purpose

The result is a series that can satisfy two different kinds of viewers at once. Industry people may catch simplified gauges or compressed procedures and recognize the storytelling cheats. General audiences get real rigs, real roughnecks, and a sense of the physical and economic pressure that defines oil-field life. Between those poles sits Tommy Norris: a character who could never be reduced to paperwork if the show expects anyone to keep watching, but who operates in a world the co-creator insists is built from the real deal whenever the cameras can manage it.

Landman is not a documentary. Wallace does not pretend otherwise. What he and Sheridan have tried to build is something rarer in prestige television: a heightened drama whose sweat, machinery and regional detail still come from people who have done the work—and who know exactly which truths to keep, and which ones to bend, so the story does not collapse into a filing cabinet.