Paramount-Plus’ drama series “Landman,” TV’s hottest current property, is a captivating West Texas oil-industry chronicle of roughnecks and rednecks, hotheads and hot girls, menaces and mavericks, high rollers and low-lifes – all seemingly with criminal-grade chips on their shoulders.
Every episode of the completed two seasons features the corporate and the common, the reckless and considerate, the superficial and substantive, staunch allies and stiff rivals. And this herd of headstrong characters is corralled in the Lone Star State’s Permian Basin, primarily in Midland and Odessa – home to real-life, non-Hollywood drag racers Chad Green (Funny Car), Chris and Mason McGaha (Pro Stock), and Mason Wright (Pro Mod).
Chris McGaha, who proudly said he has watched every episode through Season 2 and is awaiting the late-2026 Season 3 debut, owns Harlow Sammons of Odessa. It’s an oilfield equipment and service supply company that manufactures custom equipment. While he doesn’t have the same responsibilities as the constantly-under-seige main character Tommy Norris, played by Billy Bob Thornton, McGaha said he can sympathize with him.
“I don’t actually go out on location like Billy Bob does. And I’m not a landman, per se,” he said. “But being a shop foreman at a big shop like this, I feel some of his headaches and think, ‘God, this is my life some days.’
“And then my dad [NHRA Division 4 Hall of Famer Lester McGaha] laughed, because before I had started watching, he told me, ‘Wait till you watch it.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ McGaha said. “He goes, “Well, his wife and his daughter, remind me of your wife and daughter.”
That means McGaha just might have his hands full. Thornton’s TV wife, Angela (Ali Larter, and daughter, Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) keep things lively with their . . . ummmm . . . sensual flaunting, financial indulgences, wild antics, and – in the case of the latter – unintentionally hilarious chattering.
Holly McGaha and daughter Berkley might not appreciate the comparison, although Berkley does attend Texas Christian University, like Ainsley Norris and presumably did not turn her admission interview into an entertaining, eye-rolling farce like Ainsley did. The McGahas have a quiet, young son, Mason – also an NHRA Pro Stock driver – who’s following in his father’s footsteps, just like the fictional Norris family has son Cooper (Jacob Lofland) who’s learning the oil industry the hard way.
Chris McGaha said, “It’s like you sit here and watch it and you’re just like … And we don’t have food fights at our house, but some of the stuff that goes on at their dinner is like, ‘Oh my God, this is stuff that goes on in my own house!’ I’m like, ‘Oh my God, they got a camera in my house!’
“A lot of it is close to home,” he said. “A bunch of it hits close to home.”
As Green and Wright know, as well, “Everybody out here is somehow or another connected to the oilfield,” McGaha said. “Midland / Odessa’s kind of like the way for the oilfield like a Charlotte, North Carolina, is for racing and NASCAR. It’s a different world out here.”
Green owns Midland-located Bond-Coat, Inc., which, according to its website “has been serving the oil industry for [more than] 45 years” as “a leading provider of oilfield services . . . [and] an industry leader in external casing and tubing coatings for corrosion prevention.”
Wright’s Shaneda Machine, Inc. company is based in Odessa and manufactures equipment used in the oilfields. Its website says it specializes in precision machining and repair services. Wright’s father once owned Penwell Knights Raceway, the area’s premier dragstrip.
Surprisingly, Penwell Knights Raceway hasn’t made even a cameo appearance in “Landman.” The demographic seems compatible.
“I’m surprised that some of that hasn’t come up,” McGaha said of the track where three generations of his family have invested a lot of time.
“That’s where I grew up. My dad raced out there in the ’80s, and then I raced out there some as a kid. Mason’s raced out there. We’ve Jr. Dragster raced out there. We’ve taken a Pro Stock car out there before and done stuff and burned in tires. And when Mason was learning how to drive, it’s where we went and practiced on burnouts and leaving the starting line. So I spent a lot of time there,” he said. “I’ve seen that place be where you couldn’t even walk through it. And then I’ve seen it before where they’re having races out there and you could roll a bowling ball and not hit anybody. I’ve seen a lot of different stages at Penwell Knights over the years.”
Central to the plot is a eatery called “The Patch Café,” where business dealings and relationships are cussed and discussed. And not surprisingly, it isn’t an authentic restaurant, at least not one by that name. “They just change the signs. The actual place is actually somewhere towards the Fort Worth area. We have dives like that [in Odessa]. There’s little dives like that all over town,” McGaha said. “There was one we used to go to on Saturday mornings. And you’d go in there at 7:30 in the morning and there’d be a whole [oilfield] crew come in there and they’d all order beer at 7:30 in the morning because they’d been out working. So here comes this whole crew, and they’re ordering beer and you’re, like, getting milk and eggs and bacon.”
McGaha said the locals have mixed reactions to “Landman” focusing on their area.
“I’ve seen a little bit of everything. I’ve seen some people out there [saying the show is] making us look like hillbillies. And then other people are like, ‘It’s cool,’” he said. “Watching it, there’s a whole bunch that goes on that’s everyday life here. I mean, there’s stuff that goes on in there, stuff I see. And then it’s funny, too, because you watch it and then you know what’s in Odessa and what’s not. So then you’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s in Odessa. That’s not in Odessa.’”
He said the natives clearly enjoy pointing out which city is home to them, just as in the “Landman” scene when lawyer Rebecca Falcone makes her first trip to the Permian Basin and goes to pick up her rental car. The agency issues her a luxury make, and she asked for a rental that wasn’t quite so ostentatious. The rental-car agent told her driving that car was no big deal in Midland but cautioned her to be careful driving it in Odessa.
“That’s always been, they’ve always felt like Odessa was …,” McGaha said, hinting at the rather snobbish distinctions. “Midland people always say, ‘I’m from Midland,’ and Odessa people are like, ‘Yeah, we’re from Odessa.’ A lot of people who live in Midland work in Odessa and vice versa. I mean, it’s only 15 miles between the two towns.”
McGaha said he hasn’t seen any “Landman” film crews. But if the local folks shrug at the series using their hometowns for a backdrop [as well as Fort Worth on occasion], it’s because Odessa has been in the spotlight before. It was the setting for the film and TV show “Friday Night Lights,” which depicted quasi-religious Texas high school football.
McGaha attended Permian High School but said, “I’ve never played a down of football a day in my life. I like watching football. I guess I’m too big of a sissy. Playing it never appealed to me. I always played baseball and then quit baseball and went racing.” But when film crews for “Friday Night Lights” came to town, he said he saw their presence.
“Now, when they were doing Friday Night Lights . . . I can see the stadium from our shop. And you might walk out the back door of our shop and look across and you can see the lights to the stadium. And my house is on that way, so you’d drive by it on your way home or coming [to work]. So I saw all that for years when they were filming that, because you’d drive by every day. You’d drive by there like 10 o’clock at night and it looked like they was having a football game on a Tuesday night. It was like that for a long time,” McGaha said.
“They had stuff up there kind of like when they paint the seats and stuff like Charlotte,” he said. “The seats aren’t done that way on a normal day. Well, they made it look like that. So it looked like the stands were full all the time. They had, like, mannequins and stuff up there and some stuff. You’d drive by there. It looked like they was having a football game all the time. The stands were always full. There was stuff always in the stands.”
Citizens were invited to show up and be hired as extras, but McGaha said he never became involved with that. “I never did it. I heard it was getting done because they were running ads in the paper,” he said, “but I never did. I didn’t have time.”
Thornton also played the lead role in the movie version of “Friday Night Lights.” And McGaha said Thornton’s Tommy Norris character is his favorite: “Billy Bob’s the guy. He reminds me of guys that I’ve seen, work with, been around. I know a lot of people like him. Him up there doing that is totally normal for a guy like me. I’ve seen all that.”
But he’ll be tuning back in this fall when “Landman” returns with Season 3.
