Jon Hamm

Shortly into the first episode of Landman, Billy Bob Thornton’s protagonist, Tommy Morris, is talking with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Ainsley, at a college football game. He's just met her quarterback boyfriend, and Tommy asks her if they’re being careful having sex. She replies yes and that they have one rule they stick by. Apologies in advance. “As long as he never cums in me, he can come anywhere on me,” she says. Thornton holds a comic frozen stare and excuses himself to get a Dr. Pepper. It’s funny and crude and has been seen by millions on YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram Reels. But it does nothing to move the story along.

Imagine Quentin Tarantino with a conscience, or even a historical consciousness. It’s easy if you try, as a rich junkie once sang, even if Tarantino never bothered to remove the quotation marks from every scene, as if life was all reference and no reality. Then imagine the film noir, that moral grisaille of the Thirties where everything comes in shades of gray, pulled into the technicolour Sixties, so that the fabrics are bright but the morals are polarised into good and evil, black and white, with darkness all around, and above us only sky.