Entertaining without sacrificing the entire truth.
There’s no doubt that Landman is an entertaining series. But what if I told you that one of it’s first goals is to actually inform, and portray the oil industry in a truthful, realistic way? The Paramount+ series was co-created by Taylor Sheridan and Christian Wallace, and if the name Christian Wallace sounds familiar, you might know him from the podcast “Boomtown.”
That podcast is actually what inspired Sheridan to do Landman in the first place.
Wallace was a podcast host and a journalist when Sheridan reached out to ask about getting the rights to “Boomtown” so he could turn it into Landman. And before that, the native Texan actually worked as an oil roughneck. His prior experience gave him the tools he needed to host “Boomtown,” and later provided him invaluable insight to offer up on the set of Landman.
That’s the thing that Christian Wallace really appreciates about Taylor Sheridan. The Yellowstone creator didn’t just buy the rights to “Boomtown” and handle it himself. Sheridan wanted Wallace to do the show with him from the very get-go, and that’s what Wallace has been able to do.
And Wallace told Variety that he and his experience and Sheridan and his knack for creating entertaining television work well together:
“I’m helping as far as bouncing ideas off him and giving him fuel stock that he can then Taylor-ize into the greatness that is the show, and the high stakes drama and the comedy of it all. He trusts me to be the guy on set to call a flag if we’re trying to hew to authenticity wherever we can. There aren’t a whole lot of West Texans who have worked on an oil rig running around the set, but I am one.
Even from Season 1 to Season 2, it’s amazing to see how much our cast and crew have learned about the oil and gas business, about West Texas, about all these things. I was answering so many more questions in Season 1. And now I’m like, ‘All right, Billy, you’re halfway to becoming a landman. You’ve got a lot of this stuff down now.'”
So, as you might imagine, once the cast and crew got over the learning curve of what actually goes down in the oil industry, things have gotten a lot smoother as time has gone on.
Wallace says there’s a big emphasis on Landman being realistic. When you watch the show, and some of the over-the-top scenes takes place, that might be hard to believe. But there’s a balance to it all. Even as the series sets out to entertain, Wallace explains that there’s just as much effort put into the show’s realism:
“Our mission is to entertain first. Even from Season 1 to Season 2, I’ve gotten better at understanding where to compromise on elements of truth. We’re still always going to try 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. But the complexity of what they’re doing and the processes, you could easily get bogged down in those details.
So we will use shortcuts that are, say, a visual cue of using a pressure gauge to help the audience understand, ‘This is what’s happening.’ Maybe this gauge wouldn’t really be doing that in this scene, but it helps translate what we’re trying to get across in the easiest way possible. So the oil and gas guy may be like, ‘Wait, what type of gauge are you talking about right there?’ But it’s just a storytelling device.”
That makes sense, and I’m sure it’s a no-harm, no-foul situation for those viewers that do have oil industry experience like Wallace.
In fact, Landman gets a lot more right than it gets wrong. Wallace, Sheridan and everyone else involved just have to figure out the balance of it all. There’s always a push and pull of fact and fabrication, and though the former “Boomtown” host wants to present everything as factual, he knows that sometimes it’s more important to exaggerate for the sake of entertainment:
“At the end of the day, I think even the people who were so skeptical about us making a show about the industry, once they saw it, they were like, ‘Oh, you guys actually really did get a lot of the details right.’ So I’m really proud of that. But it continues to be a thing that we navigate, of how to tell the best story while also incorporating as much authenticity as possible.”
Remember this scene?
