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“The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.”
– Ralph Nader
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A new television show digs deep into the inner workings of the west Texas oil patch. Is the show a Trojan Horse shill for the oil and gas industry, or is it a realistic representation of the dark side of oil and gas production?
The Macro
I will admit I am a fan of many of the shows Taylor Sheridan produces. From the scenery and cowboy porn of Yellowstone to the gritty neo-noir look at prisons in post-industrial America in Mayor of Kingstown, I find much of it pleasurable. Perhaps a guilty pleasure, given some of the gratuitously violent and sexual content.
That having been said, Sheridan’s latest project — Landman — presents me with much more of a dilemma.
The melodrama focuses on a field manager for an oil company played by Billy Bob Thornton. He is a classic Sheridan protagonist — a personally defective and professionally brilliant man who can’t keep his family functioning but can oversee a complex and dangerous oil field.
(As a pleasant sidebar, various scenes in the show take place near Odessa, Texas, in the heart of the Permian Basin, the largest oil field in the U.S. Odessa played a significant role in the 2004 film Friday Night Lights, in which Thornton played the head coach of the high school team Permian Panthers. In a Landman episode, Thornton takes his teenage daughter and her boyfriend to a high school football game in Odessa at the same stadium used in the film, and featuring those same Permian Panthers. Nice.)
The show has been lauded and criticized in equal measure. Television critics have responded positively to the high production value and solid cast, but climate activists and oil industry advocates cannot decide if this show is for or against fossil fuels.
The show certainly exploits the generally dangerous work that goes into maintaining an oil field, with graphic representations of horrific accidents and the accompanying loss of life. It also does (IMHO) a good job of explaining why so many people want to work in that environment; in a world where the rich get richer, the oil patch is one of the last remaining jobs where someone without post-secondary education can make a solid six-figure income.
Ultimately, it is impossible for the show to completely ignore the politics swirling around fossil fuel. Although the episodes I’ve watched to date don’t dwell on climate, there is a scene in episode 3 (the latest to stream on Paramount+) in which Thornton verbally spars with a young, big-city lawyer called in to defend the oil company from a broad range of impending liabilities. Out in the patch, they stumble across some wind turbines, which kicks off a debate about the future of energy. Thornton delivers a diatribe that, depending on your POV about climate change, might be one of the most truthful analyses of the dilemma we face when it comes to fossil fuels.
Thornton’s character, Tommy Norris, points out the manufacturing of turbines and solar panels and other alternative energy sources are still largely shackled to oil and gas. Our raging love affair with electric cars notwithstanding, we can’t generate enough clean energy to recharge them. He points out that the challenge is not only to figure out ways to stop relying on fossil fuels, but to quickly find other things that can replace them.
In all sorts of publications and (of course) on social media, climate-change deniers have hailed the monologue as a beatdown on anti-oil activists. Many of those activists have largely agreed, using the same channels to accuse the show of being a shill for oil and gas.
However, the American Petroleum Institute — the biggest oil and gas lobby in the U.S. — has declared the show dangerously misrepresentative. To combat what it says are negative stereotypes of life on the oil patch, the API has launched a million-dollar advertising campaign to run during broadcasts of Landman episodes.
So, is Sheridan shilling for the oil and gas industry, or undermining it?
Sheridan’s world view is, in fact, very hard to pin down. He has at various times said things that seem familiar and welcome to both the American right and left. His shows glamorize things like ranching and oil production, but never fail to provide reality checks that remind us these romantic scenarios come at a cost. In Yellowstone, it is the future of pristine wilderness; in Landman it is the future of the planet.
To wit, the aforementioned Thornton diatribe is not really an advertisement for the pro- or anti-oil constituencies. It is a great way to start a healthy debate over how we can start reducing our addiction to fossil fuels.
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