Taylor Sheridan Admits Demi Moore Was ‘Rage Bait’ for ‘Landman’ Critics

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One of the biggest initial criticisms of Landman‘s first season was what some viewers perceived to be the demeaning and/or diminution of its female characters. According to Taylor Sheridan, that was partly by design.

In a new interview on The Bill Simmons Podcast, while talking about his new book How to Survive in Prison, the megaproducer talked about his intention in creating controversy in his show, particularly when it came to sidelining Demi Moore for Season 1, only to make her a centerpiece in Season 2.

“I told her, when I met with Demi about that, I said, ‘Look, here’s the thing. You’re gonna be an extra in this show. For seven episodes, you’re going to be an extra, and the critics are going to … come after me. I’m ‘underutilizing this [actress], can’t write for women,’ all this nonsense,'” he remembered. “‘And then I’m going to kill your husband, and you’re going to have to run the oil company.'”

Sheridan then went on to explain of the decision, “The critics and me, I don’t care what they think, and it annoys the s**t out of them that I don’t care. And I’ll be the first to tell you that there are things that I do that rage-bait them a bit, and this is one of them.” He then explained that he withheld screeners for key episodes that would’ve explained Moore’s role expansion as Cami “because f**k them, honestly.”

He then went on to explain that he recruited Moore for the role knowing of its eventual complexity, saying, “I knew that when we put it all on her shoulders, from an audience standpoint, you’ve just seen her in little snippets as the housewife, in the background, living this fantasy. So, we’ve set her up by omission to be someone that the audience is predisposed to believe she can’t be this capable of doing this job. And not only does she have to overcome every character in this world’s opinion of her, but now she has to overcome the audience’s predetermined opinion of her. And I let her do that in the first scene of Season 2.”

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Moore’s trimmed role in Season 1 wasn’t the only way Sheridan wanted to taunt critics of Landman, either. He went on to explain that the arc with Ainsley’s (Michelle Randolph) new college roommate, Paigyn (Bobby Salvor Menuez), who is nonbinary and difficult to get along with at first, was intentionally split into two episodes to irk critics.

“Paigyn, the roommate, [was] one of the few times the network and even some of the actors called me and said, ‘You sure you don’t want to compress the resolution of Paigyn and Ainsley? What you do at Episode 10, when they become friends… You don’t want to put that in Episode 9?’ I said, ‘No, for exactly the reason you’re asking. I want to piss you off a little, and then, how dare I? and then you watch the next week and go, ‘Oh you got me,'” he said.

Landman, Paramount+