The oil fields feel real. The stakes feel real. The women are anything but real.
I am, on paper, the woman Landman thinks it’s writing. I’m tall and blonde. I’ve been married to an oilman for decades. I’ve lived in and out of Texas for more than 30 years, raised a family, watched my son play football under the Friday night lights, lived in compounds all over the world, flown into places where the work is dirty and dangerous and the stakes really are life and death. I have never—not once—met a woman like the wives, daughters, and widows Taylor Sheridan has teed up for our viewing pleasure.
The blowjob in the truck was my breaking point. Not because sex shocks me; it doesn’t. My husband has worked in oil his whole career. I understand the language of boom towns and roughnecks, of gushing wells, busted hands, and the kind of men who come home with mud ground into their boot treads. I can live with grit. What I can’t live with is a show that begins and ends an episode by turning a woman’s body into a running gag—Angela sliding down in the passenger seat to “service” her ex yet again—as if her mouth is her main character trait. Once might have been lazy. Twice feels like a thesis.
And here’s the worst part: Landman is entertaining. It’s glossy TV built on very real stakes—land rights, corporate greed, the cost of fossil fuel—and the men are written with genuine care. That’s what makes watching it as a real oilman’s wife so infuriating. The show knows how to do complexity. But it refuses to extend that courtesy to the women.
The Sheridan Woman Problem
Taylor Sheridan has made himself the cowboy of our era: the man behind Yellowstone and its spin-offs, Wind River and now Landman. He’s built an empire on a certain story: flawed men in hard landscapes, trying and failing and trying again.
Along the way, he’s also built a reputation for something else: He doesn’t know how to write women.
We’ve seen the template before. Beth Dutton in Yellowstone is often held up as a “strong female character,” but much of her strength is coded as hyper-sexualized trauma: foul-mouthed, endlessly damaged, filmed as spectacle. Sheridan knows how to write a pornified “badass” or a hot mess. What he doesn’t seem able—or willing—to write is a woman who is complicated without being a male fantasy.
Landman has already drawn fire for this. Early reviews asked if the show “hates women,” calling out its oversexualized female characters and the way they’re deployed as scenery around richly drawn male leads. Fans have questioned whether Sheridan should be “banned from writing women,” and there are threads devoted to the grotesque way the daughter’s storyline is handled. When the people who love your shows are begging you to treat women better on screen, something is broken.
The Blonde and Her Mini-Me: Angela and Ainsley Norris
Let’s start with the blonde at the center of the storm. Angela Norris, played by Ali Larter, 49, is Tommy Norris’s ex-wife. In theory, she’s a woman who’s survived the boom-and-bust cycles of oil money, a mother, an ex-partner who knows where the bodies are buried. On screen, she’s a collage of male fantasies and fears: permanently horny, bikini-ready, emotionally unhinged, addicted to shopping and drama. She’s introduced with sex and defined by it, to the point that major Season 2 beats are literally framed by that car-blowjob routine.
Her daughter Ainsley, played by Michelle Randolph, is supposed to be 17. The show treats her like a teenager and films her like a fantasy. She’s blonde, pretty, and dumb in that old familiar way. What’s striking is how closely she mirrors her mother. They move through scenes as a unit—matching hair, matching bikinis—a mother-daughter set there to take up space with their bodies. Sheridan manages to flatten two women at once, a generation apart.
In my world, oilmen’s wives and daughters are many things—conservative, liberal, religious, cynical, funny, bitter, idealistic. I’ve met women who love a designer bag and a spray tan, who thrive on a little chaos, who flirt too much at the bar. But every one of them can read a room, sense danger, manage money, and protect their children. They’re handling schools and passports, elderly parents, and teenagers straddling three cultures.
When you take the worst clichés about blondes—dumb, narcissistic, sexually available, unstable—and stitch them into not one but two main characters, that’s contempt.
The Widow and the Attorney: Elegance as Fantasy
Then there’s the widow. Demi Moore, 63, plays Cami Miller, the wife of oil tycoon Monty Miller, who dies and leaves her as M-Tex’s top stakeholder. She’s meant to be the complex one: older, wealthy, navigating grief and power. Moore brings charisma and gravitas; she always has.
But Landman doesn’t write Cami as a woman with competence—more like a woman with couture. The show hopes for the symbolism of a “power widow” without doing the work of giving her power. She poses in her designer ensembles and struts into the oil fields in Jimmy Choos. The one gratuitous scene with her pouring over file boxes on the floor is more staging than character development.
And I call bullshit on the idea that she suddenly has “agency” because she now owns a piece of her husband’s empire. Real agency is asking the right questions. Reading the contracts. Understanding the politics. Knowing which men are lying to you, and why. The woman Sheridan gives us does none of that. She trusts the wrong men and makes a deal with a man who is a murdering drug lord. She’s not running the business—she’s being run by it, and by the men around it.
Then there is Rebecca, the attorney.
Rebecca is sharper. Younger. Professionally trained. She understands liability, exposure, the mechanics of corporate survival. She walks into a room like she belongs there. She speaks the language. She is, at least initially, written like one of the men.
And then—inevitably—she’s in Charlie’s bed.
The first time is after a turbulent private-jet flight. Fear, adrenaline, alcohol. A drunk, post-crisis hookup that turns into a wake-up-in-his-bed one-night stand. The show frames it as a human impulsive moment, almost understandable.
But that’s precisely the point.
Why must the competent woman be sexually available? Why does Sheridan insist that a woman can’t just be formidable—she has to be romantically entangled? Rebecca doesn’t get to be the shark. She gets to be the shark who also wakes up tangled in the sheets.
When they reconnect later for work, the script plays coy: a professional meeting that softens into flirting, kissing, and a dinner invite. The writing implies, “See? She’s strong. She’s having sex like a man would.” But that’s still centering the male gaze. It’s the old fantasy: the cool girl who can negotiate a contract by day and still slide into a man’s bed by night.
Real women in high-stakes business understand leverage, optics, and risk. That doesn’t mean they don’t have sex. It means they understand timing and consequence. Sex may be private, complicated, even be reckless. But it’s rarely this convenient.
Sheridan is at least consistent: No matter how sharp or ambitious a woman becomes, she will still take off her clothes.
Rebecca is a missed opportunity.
The Men Get to Be Complicated
It’s not that Landman can’t do characters. Look at the men. Jon Hamm’s Monty Miller, before the show kills him off, is a swaggering oil baron with charm and rot in equal measure. Billy Bob Thornton’s Tommy Norris is flawed, funny, and frightening. His father, his son, the roughnecks, and hangers-on—they all get to be specific. Different faces, different bodies, different arcs that rise and fall.
Even secondary male characters are allowed dignity. They get quiet scenes, bad decisions, unexpected loyalties. They’re shown working, failing, trying. The camera and the script grant them interiority. The women, meanwhile, are mostly busy bending over things.
There’s even a blink-and-you-miss-it cowboy cameo in the arena that sure looks like Sheridan himself—a Marlboro-man self-insert riding his own bronc through the fantasy. Men, in his universe, get to be myth and man. Women get to be myth and mouth.
The Women He Won’t Write
Here’s where I must put my own life on the record. A real oilman’s wife is a logistics officer and an emotional first responder, not a poolside extra. Our husbands sometimes do dangerous work in places that can kill them; they travel to hostile environments and make decisions with consequences that you feel in your body when the phone rings at 2 a.m. We weren’t running off to marry the next thug with a Bentley when things got difficult.
I moved all over the f—ing world. I killed my own career, for years, to be a wife and a mother in this life. So did many of the women I lived alongside in expat housing. They were engineers, teachers, lawyers, artists before they became “the wife.” Some kept working. Others couldn’t, because of visas or kids or geography. All of them doing the emotional labor to hold it together.
Have I known women who love sunshine and a martini poolside on a Thursday? Of course. Big hair and big hearts are real in Texas. Big hearts don’t cancel out bad writing though.
Why Still This in 2026?
It’s 2026. We’ve watched wave after wave of “prestige television.” We’ve sat through MeToo, reckonings about workplace harassment, endless think pieces about representation and the male gaze. Women like me—over 50 with our own money and our own streaming passwords—aren’t fringe viewers.
We are the audience.
I don’t need every show about oil to be a feminist masterpiece. I do, however, expect that a man, given this much money and power, can manage to write one woman, just one, who doesn’t exist solely for the male gaze.
That’s the bar.
We deserve better stories than this. And frankly, so do the men who have to live with the real women Sheridan refuses to see.
