---
title: "How Taylor Sheridan Pitched Landman: A Bad Santa Running an Oil Company"
description: "Taylor Sheridan, the writer behind 'Yellowstone' and a sprawling television empire, has revealed how he landed Billy Bob Thornton for his oil drama 'Landman': not with a script or a deck, but with a single, irresistible image — Thornton's foul-mouthed antihero from 'Bad Santa,' this time running an oil company in West Texas."
category: "Entertainment"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/entertainment
author: "Valeria Ortiz"
published: 2026-07-03T03:38:32.000Z
updated: 2026-07-03T03:38:32.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/how-taylor-sheridan-pitched-landman-a-bad-santa-running-an-oil-company
tags: ["Taylor Sheridan", "Landman", "Billy Bob Thornton", "Paramount+", "television"]
---
# How Taylor Sheridan Pitched Landman: A Bad Santa Running an Oil Company

Taylor Sheridan, the writer behind 'Yellowstone' and a sprawling television empire, has revealed how he landed Billy Bob Thornton for his oil drama 'Landman': not with a script or a deck, but with a single, irresistible image — Thornton's foul-mouthed antihero from 'Bad Santa,' this time running an oil company in West Texas.

Hollywood pitches are usually elaborate affairs. Taylor Sheridan's for "Landman," by his own account, took about four words.

## The pitch

As Sheridan recently recounted, and [Deadline reported](https://deadline.com/2026/07/taylor-sheridan-pitched-landman-billy-bob-thornton-bad-santa-1236973721/), the prolific creator sold Billy Bob Thornton on the show with a single comparison: imagine Willie, Thornton's caustic, hard-drinking crook from the 2003 comedy "Bad Santa," but instead of knocking over department stores, he's running an oil operation in West Texas. Thornton, by Sheridan's telling, needed no more than that, responding with immediate, unprintable enthusiasm and signing on.

It is a neat encapsulation of how Sheridan works: not with a thousand-page series bible, but with an image sharp enough to do the selling itself.

## What 'Landman' is

The show, which premiered on Paramount+ in late 2024, casts Thornton as Tommy Norris, a "landman" — the fixer who negotiates the leases, rights and daily crises that keep an oil field running — at a company in the booming, brutal petroleum country of West Texas. Created by Sheridan with Christian Wallace and inspired by the podcast "Boomtown," it wraps family dysfunction, corporate risk and cartel danger around Thornton's weary, wisecracking lead.

Audiences responded. The series became a hit for the streamer, a second season followed in 2025, and it has since been renewed for a third — one more entry in a lineup that keeps expanding.

## Part of an empire

"Landman" is a single thread in Sheridan's unusually large tapestry. Since "Yellowstone" became a phenomenon, he has filled Paramount+ with related and original dramas — from the prequels "1883" and "1923" to the Michelle Pfeiffer-led "The Madison" — making him one of the most productive forces in television. His method, the "Landman" story suggests, scales because it starts simple: find the one idea a star can't say no to, and build the rest around it.

For "Landman," that idea was a familiar rogue in an unfamiliar world — and, as the anecdote goes, it was all the pitch anyone needed.

## Sources

- [Taylor Sheridan cited 'Bad Santa' in his 'Landman' pitch to Billy Bob Thornton](https://deadline.com/2026/07/taylor-sheridan-pitched-landman-billy-bob-thornton-bad-santa-1236973721/)
- [Landman (TV series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landman_(TV_series))