This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Matt Toohey, 42, the land manager at Forge Energy III in San Antonio, Texas. He has watched every episode of the television drama, Landman, which follows a fictional landman and is in production for its second season. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I barely knew what being a landman meant when I became one after graduating law school in 2008, and I don’t think I was unique — there’s a general misunderstanding of what we do. When the show “Landman” came out last November, I watched every episode and even co-hosted a podcast breaking it down.
After nearly two decades in the industry, I can see pretty clearly where the series shines and where it’s totally inaccurate.
Landmen are essentially middlemen for the oil and gas industry.
I worked as a landman for years before securing my current job, where I handle business development and manage land. But once a landman, always a landman.
Simply put, landmen are in charge of acquiring the contracts that allow oil and gas companies to drill wells. We deal with thousands of acres that we’re trying to lease for wells, and we have to figure out who owns the oil and gas across that area. Companies use us as kind of middlemen: the ones who negotiate land rights and get deals done.
My real day is probably too boring for hit TV.
Depending on location and project, some landmen work solely in the courthouse, others only on buying land. I’ve worked in many roles, doing everything from figuring out who owns land (what we call “running title”) to securing leases, walking pipelines, and managing deals.
When I was running title in my early career, I’d often spend my whole day in the courthouse. I’d need to figure out who owned the minerals and surface on hundreds of acres, and whether there were existing leases on that stretch of property. This could produce thousands of documents, since I was putting together a complicated puzzle to give a person or company the ability to drill wells.
Now, almost all of my day-to-day is spent in the office. I rarely go out into the field, but I’ll sometimes meet with landowners and partners. Generally, my job wouldn’t make for great TV.
The show exaggerates in a lot of ways — I don’t have action-packed meetings with cartel leaders.
From a high-level perspective, Taylor Sheridan’s show did well in bits and pieces, but there are some pretty sizable errors, probably for cinematic effect.
For starters, we are rarely, if ever, involved in any of the labor related to actual drilling. We’re not the ones putting out fires on location, and any of the situations where Billy Bob Thornton’s character is operating the well are totally erroneous. Maybe landmen would’ve been doing that 40 or 50 years ago, but now there are whole teams within companies that handle that stuff.
I found the scenes with the cartel interesting, even though they were an extreme exaggeration. We do deal, though, with all sorts of owners, from farmers to 85-year-old guys a few states away collecting mailbox money. Basically, take some of the situations in the show and dilute them by 10,000-fold to get a sense of the fires we’re constantly putting out.
Certain components are pretty accurate, though, and I’m excited for season two.
The series shines in understanding the lingo of the business, and depicting the landman as the company middleman. It did a good job of showing how many aspects of business the landman can touch.
The whole plot line about the landman and his colleagues sharing a house isn’t totally uncommon, either — when I was working in Ohio, my bosses were from Texas, so they rented houses and condos while working on projects.
My friends who co-hosted the podcast with me wrestled with the question of whether they’re glad the show exists, but I didn’t have much doubt. Some parts of the script about the minutiae of this business were well-researched, and it brought the head-butting between clean energy and oil and gas to the forefront.
When season two comes out, I’ll probably watch every episode, added drama and all.
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