Taylor Sheridan’s Best Non-Yellowstone Series Yet Is Finally Ready for the Franchise Treatment

Taylor Sheridan holds the middle ground in the universe of prestige drama. He is a showrunner whose tough, morally complicated Americana has already redrawn Paramount’s programming brand. His shows, Yellowstone and all of its spin-offs, established the tone for streaming. However, among all the programs, one is a quiet, haunted counterpoint to the ranching empire’s sprawl: Landman. Sheridan’s oil field drama, adapted from the podcast Boomtown, gets rid of cowboys and cattle but keeps the hard-boiled social realism that drives his hallmark storytelling. More a cornerstone than an addition to Sheridan’s busy docket, Landman is a show that can bear a lot of spinoffs and build franchise heft on its own. Sheridan’s oilfield drama, adapted from the podcast Boomtown, departs from cowboys and cattle without abandoning the rugged social realism that drives his hallmark storytelling. More a cornerstone to Sheridan’s busy slate than an addition, Landman is a series that can sustain many spin-offs and build its own franchise gravity.

Landman is contemporary television in its timing and thematic resonance. Sheridan builds Yellowstone’s world on American myth and frontier nostalgia, while Landman places itself in the modern energy economy, the boomtowns, workers, and deal-makers whose lives revolve around drilling, fracking, and the enormous fortunes (and dangers) beneath the earth. It fictionalizes a classically modern frontier at its center, one in which land is traded for money as a battleground and risk is measured not in cattle drives but in oil barrels. With Paramount beset by streaming wars and audience fragmentation pressures, Sheridan delivers a rare commodity: a show that balances a line between character-driven drama and world-building at scale. Landman isn’t a notch in the Sheridan-verse; it’s a mark of the franchise’s maturity, a sign that Sheridan can move beyond cowboys without losing his creative grip on power, morality, and the American dream.

The Sheridan Formula Evolves Through Landman

Sheridan writes in the present tense about America’s contradictions: land, labor, wealth, and violence. His formula highlights the clash between tradition and survival, and it proves sturdy because it evolves across genres. In Yellowstone, ranchers defend their kingdom. In Mayor of Kingstown, prison economies dictate the fate of entire towns. With Landman, Sheridan moves on to the oil business, the modern equivalent of frontier gold. The drill of the roughneck replaces the cowboy’s horse, but the stakes remain the same: power, loyalty, and survival.

As opposed to the open skies of Yellowstone, Landman unfolds in the suffocating grit of rigs and refineries. The series doesn’t depend on wide-open vistas but on the combustible tension of men and women whose existence is bound to high-stakes labor. Sheridan shows his brilliance by exploring industries and geographies that prestige television ignores. As others sensationalize city crime, Sheridan examines the overlooked “other America” workers, hustlers, and dreamers who populate terrain too easily dismissed as flyover.

In reimagining the oil boom in his dramatic terms, Sheridan ingrains an economic phenomenon with a life and living mythology. This is important because it shows that Sheridan is a versatile franchise creator. Yellowstone survives through intergenerational strife and mythologized Western legends. Landman survives on immediacy, relevance in today’s world, and an uncertain energy future.

In the same way that Yellowstone spawned in 1883 and 1923, tracking the family dynasty through the centuries, Landman can explore multiple oil towns, corporate boardrooms, and international consequences. Sheridan shows his formula isn’t exclusive to cattle or cowboy hats. Instead, it’s tied to human ambition, wherever it may emerge. This shift ensures that Sheridan’s empire is not a genre-specific anomaly but a conscious redesign of what franchise television can look like.

Why Landman Lends Itself to Spinoffs

landman-season-2-billy-bob-thornton-sam-elliott

The oil industry is sprawling. It is a web that stretches from West Texas fields to Wall Street offices and from environmental battlefields to international negotiations. Sheridan recognizes Landman has storytelling fuel enough to propel multiple spin-offs. Where Yellowstone’s Duttons provide viewers with a family tree of story, Landman provides fans with an industry tree, each branch promising drama. One series might follow workers who endanger their lives in offshore rigs. Another might trace executives who are embroiled in corruption and global markets. Another might follow environmental activists or the families of small-towners displaced by drilling.

Sheridan always writes with franchise potential in mind. He’s aware of how audiences hunger for layered worlds, in which secondary characters can carry their own epics. In Landman, every oil well, every company, every town implies new stories. The show dramatizes an industry that is both local and global, intimate and geopolitical. That duality offers Sheridan endless spin-off possibilities that feel organic rather than contrived. While Yellowstone spin-offs would track a single family backward in time, Landman spin-offs could go outward, following thematic threads without being tied to a specific bloodline.

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The Sheridan Formula Evolves Through Landman

Why Landman Lends Itself to Spinoffs

The timing is perfect. Streaming services don’t desire universes but one-and-done. Sheridan has already proved himself to be a gold mine in creating committed viewers. Landman is the means by which Paramount can establish a fresh franchise that expands its fanbase beyond the Western enthusiasts. By grounding the series in timely issues, climate change, energy politics, labor disputes, Sheridan gets the stories to function not just as entertainment but as a cultural mirror. In a media landscape in which audiences crave both escapism and relevance, Sheridan can deliver both in the same package.

Sheridan’s Characters are Franchise Anchors

Dale (James Jordan) in a plaid shirt next to Tommy (Billy Bob Thornton) in a grey suit in Landman

Sheridan’s shows endure because he builds archetypal characters who feel authentic. In Landman, he populates the universe of oil with ambitious, desperate, and resilient characters. The oilfield worker is the new cowboy: solitary but also a member of a dangerous fraternity, skilled but expendable. The corporate executive is the feudal lord, master of resources but indebted to the whims of markets and public opinion. These are not cardboard figures; they pulse with the same contradictions that characterize Sheridan’s other heroes, ruthless and loyal, worn out but unbreakable. Each archetype holds out the promise of expansion.

A spin-off might follow a rig worker’s family and the social cost of boomtown economies. A mid-level manager might headline a series about corruption and whistleblowing. An environmental lawyer might be the focal point of an oppositional but networked narrative. Sheridan’s characters, grounded in gritty detail, give each spin-off a human anchor. Above all, Sheridan will not glamorize the world of oil. It sensationalizes its dangers and disputes, never letting the human stakes out of focus.

Just as Yellowstone examines the price of legacy, Landman examines the price of work and energy. In both cases, audiences connect with characters first, industry second. This character-first framing ensures the Landman spin-off inherits not only the brand but the beating heart of Sheridan’s storytelling. And in a television environment controlled by spectacle, Sheridan’s focus on human struggle guarantees longevity.

Building a New Sheridan Empire

Tommy (Billy Bob Thornton) looking down wearing a white shirt, with Dale (James Jordan) in Landman

Paramount already leans on Yellowstone to drive subscriptions. By building Landman into its own franchise, the network can guarantee viewership longevity. While viewers can tire of cattle ranches and frontier nostalgia, oil dramas can tap into contemporary cultural debates around energy, climate, and politics. Sheridan is ideally positioned to seize this genre opening. His reputation for authenticity, filming on location, consulting with industry experts, and prioritizing realism, lends credence to Landman. That credence shores up the franchise’s foundation.

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The Sheridan Formula Evolves Through Landman

Why Landman Lends Itself to Spinoffs

Sheridan’s Characters are Franchise Anchors

Building a New Sheridan Empire

Unlike spin-offs devised as cash-grabs, Landman can grow organically with each new series blossoming from the world Sheridan already renders with meticulousness. Paramount could use this desperately. In the era of streaming, franchises are no longer a luxury; they are lifelines. Last, Landman is Sheridan’s most ambitious foray into empire-building. While Yellowstone is about America’s past, Landman is about its future and present. In dramatizing the oil industry, Sheridan has tapped into a narrative universe broad enough to support years of storytelling.

The series proves Sheridan is not beholden to the cowboy myth. He is creating a new mythology. As he does, he ensures his legacy on television will not only endure but expand, digging deeper into the shared psyche with every new episode. Taylor Sheridan has already shown that television audiences will follow him to Montana ranches, Kingstown streets, and Texas oil rigs. With Landman, he demonstrates his narrative inclinations extend far beyond the boundaries of Yellowstone.

Sheridan is interweaving the American experience today, and the oil industry provides an inflammable backdrop that makes the drama sound epic and up to date. As Paramount moves forward, Landman could be its future anchor. It has the size and the substance to build its own universe, one that can exist separately alongside Yellowstone rather than as a spin-off of it. Sheridan’s finest work is done when he walks the fine line of being true to his material while being ambitious, and Landman is both. In the television franchise era, Sheridan reminds viewers once more that his way of telling a story is not only viable but without end.

An oil rig is on fire on the poster for Landman.

The Sheridan Formula Evolves Through Landman

Why Landman Lends Itself to Spinoffs

Sheridan’s Characters are Franchise Anchors

Building a New Sheridan Empire

The Sheridan Formula Evolves Through Landman

Why Landman Lends Itself to Spinoffs

Sheridan’s Characters are Franchise Anchors

Building a New Sheridan Empire

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