As a Texas girly, my very biased and unprofessional review of the newish show "Landman."

 So I have several blogs kind of in the works but some are very emotional (i.e our house is being packed up this week and Bubs and I had a pretty emotional last marriage counseling session) so I've been distracting myself by watching the Paramount show Landman. For those who are unaware, it's apparently written by the same guy who did the Yellowstone series. Although, I have only seen clips of Yellowstone apparently Landman has a very similar feel and tone. 

I am very protective of my home state so I always go into shows like that with some trepidation because there are so few that actually get Texas correct. Most of the time, we are presented as this overly racist, backwoods group of hillbillies that can't get along with anyone else. I actually have no problem with depictions like that, I just chose to turn them off because all I can do is pick them apart with how wrong they are. I think the best way to look at Texas is more like a microcosm of the US. We have huge cities with traffic on par with LA. We have tiny little towns of a hundred people. We have a very mixed heritage and history (for example, I have roots to one of the "first" Anglo Texan families on my dad's side, most of my mom's family can trace their history to specific towns in Germany then I have a few random Irish, Spanish and others thrown in for good measure). We have a coast, we have deserts, we have steamy forests and we have just as many towns and cities with Spanish names as we do English. Our "national" cuisine is actually Mexican food that we call Tex-Mex to make it our own. 

So with that, I was somewhat nervous about the show and after watching the first five episodes, I think they did a "good" (not great) job of representing our state. I actually feel pretty connected to the idea of the show because I went  to college in the general area. I was a waitress that served roughnecks and crews and still have some deeply engrained memories (both good and bad) of my time in West Texas. 

Bubs made me edit the whole blog and put this in--huge spoilers ahead (sorry grouchy man, not sure if my 40 whole readers per blog were going to ruin the show for the world).

So I've divided this into some categories. One is the what the hell were the writers thinking category. The second is stuff that was ok and the third were things about Texas which I think they did a great job at capturing. 

In the what the hell were they thinking category: 

The first one is one that almost takes me out of the show entirely, and that was the spring time high school football game. And if I missed something and it was actually in the fall, what in the hell was the top high school recruit doing on the sidelines of Friday night out of town game?  I've been to hundreds of high school football games in my life and not a single one took place during the spring. And Friday night football is almost a bigger religion than Protestantism here and every HS player lives for Friday nights and none would take a game off to travel with his girlfriend. This was such an egregious error that I can't believe they let it make it to the screen. Especially since both Billy Bob Thornton and Allie Larter were in the original Friday Night Lights which made Texas football a national thing and led to a whole series. 

The next one is the use of tools at the wells. I'm a girly girl, but I love me some projects and I know how to use a pipe wrench (just ask my husband--who had to clean up a huge mess from before I knew how to use correctly use a pipe wrench) and to see a dramatic moment where the hero has to save the day and the wrench is on backwards, yikes. 

Maybe because I am a Texas blonde, I can't stand the daughter and the mom being so overly "Texas blonde" is really annoying to me. The daughter openly talks about sex in in front of her dad (in one of the most cringe worthy scenes I've ever seen in a show). I've met some pretty dingy girls but I can't ever see any of them saying something like that to their dad. My dad would have slapped the ever living shit out of me had I ever mentioned how I was letting a boy "get off" when we had sex--and I would deserve it. The wife also drives me nuts as the spend thrift Fort Worth wife who is going through her third husband's cash with no regard. It's just over the top and would have been so much more interesting if she would have been a normal wife who had to deal with the stress and reality of the oil man life. 

The stuff that was ok: 

The general pace of life in West Texas was pretty well done. I instantly recognized the neighborhoods, the highways, the constant driving,  the aerial shots, etc.. 

The way the oil crews acted and treated each other was ok. Because I worked at two restaurants in the general area, I got to deal with a lot of oil patch guys (and girls-I don't think there are many women on the crews but I know there are some because they could be really fun at Hooters). The three guys who got drunk, grabbed me and then waited for me outside the restaurant (and one of whom I knocked out cold with a very lucky punch a couple of weeks later) were exactly the oil patch guys the show is trying to portray. Very well paid but poorly educated young men who spend most of their time isolated at work and in the trailers--and there are certainly those types of guys. Ironically enough I saw way more of them when I worked at "the pepper" restaurant than I did at Hooters. We saw a ton of oil patch guys come into Hooters but they were always on their best behavior, super respectful and did an amazing job of policing each other if one would have too much to drink. I didn't work in the "main" oil patch Hooters but I was close enough that we knew if oil prices were going up, we were going to make good money. I actually became really good friends with an older guy who had been a roughneck for many years and one day he handed me $2500 and said that oil was up, his bonus had come in and he appreciated how nice I'd been to him over the course of the year. I begged and pleaded with him that I couldn't take the money and he wouldn't hear of it. Of course he never paid for another drink while I was working and I gave him as much free food as I could--but then he'd just tip me what he would have paid for food.  So while there were certainly hard nosed guys who fought all the time, I hope they do some justice to the really nice guys who work in oil because it's great money and at the same rime they are super generous to everyone around them. 

The stuff that is so real that I've either seen it in real life or could imagine seeing it in real life: 

The older guys constantly talking on smartphones in leather cases because every phone call is critical and must be made NOW. While I live in a mainly agricultural area, there are a lot of similarities between the people who work in Ag services and oil services. I actually had flash backs every time Billy Bob Thornton whips out his phone. I mentioned him in my thanksgiving blog buy my dads cousin has the exact demeanor, tone and vocabulary as Billy Bob Thornton does in that show. He's known to us Uncle Jessup and literally in the middle of the food line at Thanksgiving--in front of more than 40 people, including kids— he got on his phone and said "Ted, I need to know that that irrigation system is going to be delivered on Friday--fucking tomorrow. Don't give me that bullshit Ted we don't take fucking Black Friday off Ted. Call me when it's done, don't fuck me Ted." All while my sister pleaded with him to stop and go outside if he needed to be on his phone.

The Mexican and Mexican-American families and they way they are in the houses is so well done. So I work in a very temporary and Ag labor school district and some of my dearest friends are Mexican and Mexican American. I have been to so many of those gatherings where there are so warm and welcoming and there is food seemingly spread across the entire house. Every man offers you a beer and every Abuela and Tia has a spoon that just adds more and more food on your plate. They are some of the warmest and most welcoming people I’ve ever met. 

I loved the "Brews and Babes" coffee girl scene. I'm not sure if they then down in Midland-Odessa when we were in the area but as a former Hooters girl, that girls energy is exactly I wanted to match every time I went to work (and yes, I would have had no issues being a bikini barista—her outfit was adorable). I was ok at the "whatcha havin' sugar?" type talk but some of my co-workers were literal pros and they could make guys melt with a flash of cleavage, a hint of accent and at least the appearance of genuine interest. I was always much better with the older guys but I also think I was genuinely interested in them and their stories. But the girls who could charm the younger guys (who had too much money and not enough brains)  the way the barista did in the show did really well for themselves at Hooters. 

As much as I loathed the football scene, one thing that they did really well was the attention a great high school athlete could get from girls, even girls from out of town. I know this because I dated one of them! When Bubs started to get real attention from college scouts (and occasionally a few pro scouts) I would hear girls whispering about him wondering what his real prospects were and how tall and cute he was and wondering if he had a girlfriend (uh yeah bitch, I'm sitting right here). I will never in my life forget a double header at a school about an hour north of us. I had something going on early so I only was able to make it to the second game. I walked up to Bubs being chatted up by two very cute girls from the opposing school while he was at the snack bar. When he saw me he sheepishly shooed them away and I seethed with jealousy while he tried to convince me that he had no idea who they were. My friend and I made it a point to sit close to them and we could over hear their conversation and it seemed like they knew everything about who was a college or pro prospect on both teams.

The other scene that is so real to me is when the "Old Money" Texas rancher tries to lecture Billy Bob Thornton and can't wait for his "kind" to leave. I've talked about my sister’s in-laws before but that is exactly who they were while the Grandparents were still alive. They wouldn't allow my now brother in law to have anything to do with his pregnant ex-girlfriend (my sister). They are nice enough people now but they are a North Texas ranch family with serious old school money and lot of political and social power. I can remember hugging my very pregnant sister while she was sobbing because the baby's dad had told her she wasn't "good enough to have access to all the things the family had worked for." Meanwhile their wealth existed in large part because of how hard the people they look down on work at making the whole system run. I still get angry at it and I got angry watching that scene because of how much people like that hurt my sister. The Christian charity and high and mighty attitude goes right out the window when they feel like someone beneath them is after their money. One of the great injustices in my life will always be that my brother in law's grandma (the one who caused all the problems with my sister) will never see that my sister wants nothing to do with their family money and choses to live a in nice but modest home with almost no extravagance. This while his brothers are each twice divorced to women of proper social status--who cleaned them out every time.  

So yeah, that's my distraction for the evening. Enough to keep me from thinking of the fact that movers are going to come back up my kids' bedrooms and I'm going to have to consider painting over the growth markers we have marked outside the bathroom door to make the house ready for people other than us to move into...here come the tears!