Another day, another huge hit from Taylor Sheridan for Paramount.

The company now reports that Sheridan’s new series “Landman” has garnered 14.6 million views in one week on Paramount Plus and linear television, making it the biggest premiere week ever for a Paramount Plus original.

Does it deserve it? Well, I’ve watched all the episodes that have aired so far and I definitely like it quite a bit.

The main reason Landman works is its leading man, the endlessly charismatic Billy Bob Thornton, who may not give a wild performance outside of the roles we usually see him in, but as a leading man he’s fantastic and compelling here, even if that’s the case His role is simply to work in middle management at a slightly corrupt oil company in Texas.

The conflict is triggered when a stolen company plane used by a cartel to transport drugs is destroyed by an oil rig and everyone involved is looking for someone to blame. That someone is Thornton’s Tommy Norris, and he must navigate a corporate quagmire and legal sharks to stay afloat. Oddly enough, however, this storyline seems to be mostly resolved in Episode 4, although the series appears to be building up to a larger conflict between Norris and his boss Monty Miller, played with the expected grit by Jon Hamm.

There are B and C plots that venture into very different territories. The first is Norris’ son Cooper, who tries to work his way up the company from the ground up by working on oil rigs, but in four episodes there have already been two harrowing disasters. He says his goal is to run an oil company one day, but to do that he has to actually survive it all.

In a plot separate from really any oil aspect, it involves Norris’ ex-wife Angela, played by Ali Larter, and his daughter Ainsley, played by Michelle Randolph. Especially with his daughter, it’s more than strange that… every single episode She talks explicitly about sex (I honestly can’t believe what she says to her father in the pilot) or appears in her underwear or partially naked when the show goes out of its way to tell you she’s 17 and still in the is high school. In real life, actress Michelle Randolph is 27, not 17, so that’s… a bit of a relief, but the show goes out of its way to pretend she’s underage in the context of the show, and relies heavily on that her sex appeal is pretty strange. Still, I expect this will be Randolph’s breakthrough, after her turn in 1923 that brought her here.

Landman’s storyline, the minutiae and corruption of the oil industry, doesn’t seem like particularly fertile ground for an interesting plot, but Billy Bob Thornton makes it work, as does Sheridan’s ever-present guiding hand. As with his other shows, it seems likely that Landman will have longevity over an unknown number of seasons, but unlike those other shows, the series fares significantly better than anything else he’s done recently, barring from Yellowstone itself. And who knows, when the show is over, Landman might become his next big thing.

Sure, I would recommend it. I’ve gotten the last few years out of Yellowstone, but all of these Sheridan series are inherently watchable, and that’s true for Landman more than most. I expect interest in this will only grow from here.

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