'Landman's' Women Are Not the Story

The show sells fantasy. I lived the reality. And I’m not staying quiet about it.

Image: SFD Media/Getty

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

I can’t shut up about Taylor Sheridan’s Landman. I have tried.

Here’s why. I am, on paper, the woman Landman thinks it’s writing. Tall, blonde, married to an oilman for decades, lived in compounds all over the world, raised a family through it. I have never—not once—met a woman like the wives, daughters, and widows Sheridan has teed up in such a spectacularly misogynist way.

I wrote a piece about this in February. The response surprised me, not because women agreed, I expected that. Because of how they agreed. Margo wrote in the comments: There’s an uncomfortable, watching-an-accident kind of feeling I get watching all of his female portrayals. Angie said she and her husband stopped watching mid-Season 2, and the conversation started with the sentence I think Taylor Sheridan hates women. Sonya said she spent her career around women solving real problems—poverty, housing, health—and most wore sensible shoes.

Landman will not let a woman wear sensible shoes or a face without makeup. Landman writes nuanced men, no problem. The drillers, the bosses, the lawyers, the cartel thugs, even the kid on the rig who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know yet. All of them get nuanced character arcs. Even the secondary characters get a moment that complicates them.

Then Sheridan turns the camera on a woman and it’s the same shot. Boobs. A bikini. A blowjob in a truck. A teenager filmed like she works at Hooters. A widow in Jimmy Choos who can’t read a contract. A lawyer who is sharp and competent in the boardroom but ends up in a man’s bed the same afternoon.

The men get to be myth and man. The women get to be myth and mouth.

This is 2026. We have sat through MeToo. We have read the think pieces. Women like me, over 50, with our own money and our own streaming passwords are not fringe viewers. We are the audience.

I have talked to a lot of people since this piece ran. Women who watched the show and felt ashamed for liking it. Women who stopped watching after Angela, played by Ali Larter, slides down for her second BJ in as many episodes. Viewers from Reddit agree that the series would be 'better without the hyper-sexualization' of the female characters. Women who said their daughters were watching with them felt sick about what they were both seeing. Some men too—the ones with daughters. The other men just grin at me like yeah, so what.

That grin is the problem.

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