Landman
Watch Landman on Paramount.
Jacob Loflund as Cooper Norris
Paramount is new to me. Of all the streaming services this is the most avowedly “American” and probably no offering better illustrates the divergence between how we see the world in Europe and the culture that drives the heartland US than LANDMAN. One thing the show did really well is stage authentic looking industrial accidents. In fact I'd love to use one or two of them in investigation training.
#spoiler alert
First up there was a near-miss involving a young worker joining a four man crew servicing an elderly pump in "the patch". Despite the quaint name, this is actually an enormous area of land (75,000 square miles) called officially the Permian Basin. It has been historically drilled for oil and gas in Texas since 1866 and produced 4.2m barrels per year in 2019.
The junior man on a crew is called The Worm (played earnestly by Jacob Lofland). Straight away they send him on a pointless errand up a Derrick. He wears a harness but when he slips and falls (inevitably) his rescuer does not wear one (no time?). This rite of passage treatment of young workers has largely gone from more safety conscious industry and I would be surprised if it continued even offshore these days. But then I’ve never been to The Patch.
Later on, a crewman is wearing a harness at the top station of a pipe replacement rig. But reaches out to remove a pipe hoisted up to him and gets his hand caught in the jaws of the pipe holder. This is an entirely believable accident. It forces the Worm to climb the rig (also sans harness) to rescue his crewmate. Cooper Norris aka The Worm then has to take up his colleagues role in the now three man crew and work all night to finish a huge pipe replacement; with their buddy taken to hospital. The punishing hours of work to get a rig back up and producing are totally believable and also suggest a pay structure focused on results
The main accident involves a crew loosening a rusted valve whilst, unbeknownst to them, gas leaks nearby. All are seemingly wearing alarms but none of them go off. The worm is sent for a larger wrench and so survives the explosion that incinerates the other crew members. There are some other consecutive "holes in the cheese" as well as their gas alarms not sounding: is it really plausible:
that they didn’t know what size wrench the valve uses?
that they didn’t know how to torque a wrench with a long extension?
that they didn’t consider using any lubrication?
that they did not have access to spark-free hand tools?
You might think they could smell the gas but methane often doesn’t smell. In fact the “smell” of North Sea gas here in England is an additive called methyl mercaptan.
The final serious accident involves a foreman standing on a flatbed of variously sized pipes. A clue to what happens next is his insistence that the pipes should all be one size. He jumps up and down on the pipes and they give way causing him to be trapped and fatally injured beneath a pile of them. The fact of his seniority leads to the conclusion he “should have known better”. It is not uncommon for individuals to bear the full brunt of blame for accidents they have despite the fact that root cause analysis of the indicent would inevitably lead to discussing “why” irregularly sized pipes were stacked on the same flatbed.
Along with these accidents the show is punctuated with episodes of violence and chaos:
a private jet lands on a quiet road to unload a cargo of contraband when it is hit at full speed by a tanker
an oil well is deliberately blown apart with explosives
the main protagonist - the Landman Tommy Norris (played by the laconic genius Billy Bob Thornton) - cuts off his own finger with a pen knife
There’s also brawls and gun fights and crazy driving. In effect this is a cowboy show where the horses are swapped for Dodge Rams. It makes for terrifically good television: bravura acting performances, sympathetic characters and snappy authentic sounding writing by Taylor Sheridan. One singular gripe, though, involves the sudden propensity for any character to embark on a learned climate denial diatribe at the drop of a Stetson hat. Maybe they are used to justifying their continued work in the fossil fuel industry to outsiders, but I doubt in real life they meet that many opposing opinions.
It reminded me of Kenneth Boulding in 1966 talking about “Cowboy vs Spaceman” economies. Boulding was reflecting on Adlai Stevensons metaphor “Starship Earth”:
“We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, in the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft”
In his Essay 'The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth' Boulding described the actual economies of industrialised countries as 'cowboy' economies, 'the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior, which is characteristic of open societies'. Sharon Beder (2006) reflects on this:
“He wrote of the need for a 'spaceman' economy which recognised the planet has limited supplies and a limited capacity to extract wastes. In this economy people would have to find their place 'in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form'.
While a cowboy economy maximises production and consumption as desirable goals, and success is attained by continually increasing the throughput of materials and energy, a spaceman economy tries to minimise throughput in a closed economy…Economic success in a spaceman economy would be measured by the “nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital stock, including in this the state of human bodies and minds”
Midland TX in the heart of the Patch is 480 miles from Houston, where NASA controlled the space flights. The Liquid Hydrogen fuel used by Titan and Saturn rockets in the heyday of the space race was derived from steam reforming of methane gas from the Texas oilfields. In other words, the spaceman only took off in the first place with the permission of the cowboy. The cowboy himself was the product of an absurdity: the orgy of destruction of native buffalo (bison) herds that roamed the great interior. They were replaced by European cattle utterly unsuited to the environmental conditions of American Plains and needed to be driven relentlessly north and south with seasonal regularity in order to survive bitter winters and suffocating summers. By the way, a great many of the cowboys were black emancipated slaves seeking freedom and mexicans (like a great many of the blue collar crewmen that service the Patch).
Those cowboy manners - a mixture of hat doffing formal southern deference with spittoon hittin’, hip shootin’ loudmouthery - Sheridan absolutely nails. They see themselves - maybe more so now than ever - as a breed apart. The southern democratic spirit was lassoed by George Wallace and reeled in by Nixon to create a freedom loving rule-breaking free spirit who is nonetheless bound by the Bible and a certain way of doing things.
And they love Trump. Or at least up until recently they did. All the while he was skeptical about climate change, he would have had the backing of the fossil fuel industries; be it Appalachian Anthracite or Texas Gold. These tariffs though will not be welcome. If Landman makes one thing clear its that the viability of the Patch sits squarely in the middle of a tight range of oil prices. In crashing the economy, just like he crashes companies, parties and gathering of world leaders, Donald J Trump will have bankrupted a fair few Landmen this week. The wide open spaces and freedom that consitute the American dream now look like turning into an insular self contained bubble. The crew of that ship will need to learn soon how to get along with each other.