LOCAL MEDIA
Texas is a state largely defined by its oil industry, so entertainment that touches on that aspect of the culture is quite popular around these parts. Landman, a show created by Taylor Sheridan, is about an oil-field worker, Billy Bob Thornton, navigating the ins and outs of an often dangerous career. The show is an offshoot of the podcast Boomtown by Christian Wallace, a Texas State University Graduate who has lived in San Marcos on and off ever since, that chronicles the oil boom in the Permian Basin.
Wallace grew up in a small town called Andrews, which is just north of Midland and Odessa.
“Everyone in Andrews grows up in the oil field,” Wallace said. “Most people have family and friends who work in the industry, if they don’t themselves work in the industry. That was the case for me. My uncle was in it. My dad had worked in it previously, before I was born, and my grandfather also worked in it. You just grow up surrounded by oil field culture. And I didn’t really know that pump Jacks didn’t exist everywhere until I started traveling to other parts of the state.”
Wallace actually worked as a “roughneck,” an oilfield worker, in 2013, and created Boomtown in 2019, which was a brief history of the industry in the region and its impact. Before oil, Wallace said West Texas was cattle country and sparsely populated, and the first commercial oil well Santa Rita Number One was drilled a little over 100 years ago. That well produced the first “gusher” and got everyone excited about oil in that area.
“It turned out that the region that we now know as the Permian Basin, which includes southeastern New Mexico and a good chunk of West Texas basically from just south of Lubbock down to Fort Stockton, that whole area was just teeming with oil,” Wallace said. “For years, the production had slowly been declining. From the 1980s until the 2010s, it was seeming as if West Texas was going to go by the wayside as [far as] being a big player in the oil and gas industry. But fracking came along, and they were able to access the oil that was trapped in shell rock, which is a very dense, dense rock. … Now, the Permian Basin produces somewhere around 5 million barrels per day, making it one of the most prolific oil fields in the world and by far the most prolific in the U.S.”
Wallace created Boomtown because he thought that it would be prudent for the rest of the world to “put a voice” to the stories of the many people that worked in the Permian Basin.
“What happens there affects everybody on every continent, in some way,” Wallace said. “Yet so few people knew about West Texas.”
When approached about making the podcast into a show, Wallace was elated that it would be made by Taylor Sheridan, who was also a Texan and had great “storytelling sensibilities.”
“It was thrilling — because even though the podcast did really well, and it was far more popular than I could have ever expected it to be — I knew that by having Taylor and Paramount make this show, it would reach a wider audience than anything I could have ever done,” Wallace said.
The biggest difference between the show and podcast is that with the podcast, Wallace could pivot each episode and focus on a completely new facet of the industry and area.
“You can’t do that on a TV show; you can’t go deep into all these different topics. You just have to bring in little elements as you go,” Wallace said. “Different components of the podcast pop up in the show, but they may only be a small part; things that we spend an entire episode on are … happening in a conversation or just sprinkled in as a detail about the set design or something like that. So that’s probably the biggest … [difference]. Landman is a show for entertainment. It’s not a documentary, and Boomtown was a journalistic narrative.”
All ten episodes are now available for streaming on Paramount+, and Boomtown can be heard on all of the major podcast platforms.
