Forget Yellowstone, Landman Season 3 Needs To Be More Like This Western Crime Drama
To ensure that Taylor Sheridan’s latest hit show doesn’t end up feeling like an imitation of Yellowstone, Landman should instead borrow from Breaking Bad. Whether readers love him or hate him, there is no denying the reality that the prolific writer/director Taylor Sheridan is one of the biggest voices in television in 2026. As astounding as it may seem, Sheridan has more than 11 seasons of TV on the way right now, and there may be more coming depending on renewals.
Between Landman season 3, Tulsa King seasons 4 and 5, Lioness season 3, Dutton Ranch season 2, Marshals seasons 2 and 3, The Madison seasons 2 and 3, Frisco King season 1, and Mayor of Kingstown season 5, Sheridan is a near-unstoppable force. While Yellowstone’s 1944 prequel and its rumoured 6666 spinoff are both in Development Hell for the time being, the fact that Sheridan has a dozen seasons of TV in production more than makes up for these delays.
However, all is not necessarily well in the world of Sheridan’s shows. While one of Yellowstone’s sequel shows, Dutton Ranch, was praised for largely replicating the soapy appeal of the original series, the other, CBS’s Marshals, was criticized for turning Kayce Dutton’s story into a standard, cookie-cutter police procedural. Similarly, Landman season 2 was so bad that some fans were left wondering whether Sheridan had lost his touch entirely.
Landman Season 3 Should Embrace Being A Crime Drama Like Breaking Bad
Loosely based on the podcast series Boomtown, Landman focuses on the billionaire business people who own the oilfields of Texas and, more specifically, on Billy Bob Thornton’s antihero Tommy Norris and his dysfunctional family. Compared to Sheridan’s Lioness, which breaks with his Neo-Western tastes to tell a spy story, Landman sticks much closer to the Yellowstone script.
The show focuses on a grizzled, amoral patriarch of an absurdly wealthy family who engages in all manner of questionable business practices to ensure that no one buys his land out from under him. Of course, Yellowstone was a huge hit that spawned the prequels 1883 and 1923 as well as its two sequel shows, so Landman borrowing its basic setup might seem reasonable.
However, Landman season 2 proved that this approach would not work in this instance. The Norris family’s drama was interminably boring, with a great many commentators online saying that they skipped entire scenes involving Tommy’s daughter and ex-wife.
Luckily, much like Yellowstone becoming The Godfather with horses instead of a straightforward contemporary Western saved the series, Landman season 3 can now pivot and salvage the story of the show. Rather than leaning into the family drama that was common in Yellowstone, Landman would benefit by being more like Breaking Bad, embracing the crime drama aspects of its plot, from collaborating with drug cartels and the corrupt DEA to the inherent dangers of the oil business.
Landman Already Set Up A Big Villain For Season 3
Sheridan’s breakout movie, Wind River, already offered viewers a stark and disturbing vision of the oil business’s worst side. As such, it is clear that the writer/director can move away from Yellowstone’s Dallas/Dynasty inspired soapy melodrama and into harsher crime drama territory.
However, the real sign that this change is overdue comes from Landman season 2 itself. Demi Moore's Landman character Cami Miller, an emerging player in Texas’s oil wars, is a clear candidate for the role of season 3’s lead villain.
When Cami sided with her late husband’s cartel associate instead of Tommy, she signalled that she was unafraid of dirty money once she could be guaranteed the lion’s share of it. This set her up as an ideal hubristic villain in the vein of Breaking Bad’s Gus Fring, and proves that Landman should lean into this genre instead of Yellowstone’s now-overly familiar family drama.