The Strawman in the Dorm Room

Taylor Sheridan’s Landman has always flirted with caricature, but in “Plans, Tears and Sirens,” the flirtation becomes a marriage. When Ainsley meets her college roommate Paigyn—a walking catalogue of progressive buzzwords—we witness something rarer than bad writing: a vendetta disguised as a scene.

by Charles Lloyd

Taylor Sheridan must have had a hell of a time writing Paigyn. You can almost picture him at his Montana ranch, hat tilted back, grinning as he adds another trait to the pile: vegan, check; ferret owner, check; triggered by the word “penetrate,” oh absolutely check. By the time Ainsley walks into that cramped college dorm room in “Plans, Tears and Sirens,” the penultimate episode of Landman’s second season, Sheridan has assembled something less like a character and more like a piñata stuffed with everything that makes his audience’s blood pressure spike. He hands Ainsley the bat and lets her swing.

And swing she does. When Paigyn—who uses they/them pronouns, meditates at noon, demands the room remain a music-free “safe space,” and keeps a ferret named after God knows what—asks Ainsley about her pronouns, our cheerleader heroine delivers a little monologue about the irrelevance of third-person address in direct conversation. It’s the kind of gotcha that sounds devastating if you’ve never actually thought about it for more than thirty seconds. Ainsley asks what a ferret is. Then what a weasel is. She mispronounces Paigyn’s name repeatedly, seemingly on purpose, confusing it with “pagan” and asking if it’s “Viking.” Michelle Randolph plays these moments with a sort of performative innocence that lets Sheridan have it both ways—Ainsley gets to be cruel while maintaining plausible deniability, the mean girl who never technically says anything mean.

The scene wants so badly to be funny. And here’s the thing: it could have been. Roommate comedy is practically its own genre, from The Odd Couple to those first brutal weeks of freshman year that everyone survives and later mythologizes. The forced intimacy, the negotiation of space and smell and sleep schedules, the collision of backgrounds and habits—all of it is inherently comic because all of it is inherently human. Two people who would never choose each other, stuck together, forced to figure it out. That’s drama. That’s life. That’s funny.

But Sheridan has no interest in funny. He wants vindication. Paigyn exists to be demolished, and the scene is rigged from the first frame. We learn that they object to “toxic airborne petrochemicals” like room freshener—fair enough in a dorm room the size of a closet, but Sheridan frames it as hysterical overreach. We learn they’re vegan and would prefer no animal products in the room, including Ainsley’s Jimmy Choo shoes, which Ainsley mistakes for a brand rather than cowhide because apparently being rich makes you charmingly oblivious rather than obnoxious. Every single thing Paigyn says is designed to be unreasonable, and every single response Ainsley gives is designed to be the common-sense rejoinder. It’s a Socratic dialogue where Socrates already knows he’s right and his interlocutor is an idiot.

The nadir arrives when Paigyn objects to the word “penetrate” in a discussion about coconut oil moisturizer. Sheridan could have let this moment land on its own—the absurdity is self-evident, and a lighter touch might have earned a genuine laugh. Instead, he has Ainsley launch into a graphic anecdote about a former boyfriend’s enormous penis, how she used to “spit on it and stroke it and pretend to pass out” rather than allow penetration. It’s a bizarre escalation, tonally insane, and it reveals what Sheridan actually wants from this scene: not comedy but confrontation, not wit but weaponry. Ainsley isn’t trying to be funny; she’s trying to make Paigyn uncomfortable, to claim the space through sheer sexual frankness, to out-transgress the transgressive. And Sheridan clearly thinks she’s won.

What’s missing from Paigyn is everything that makes a character worth watching: contradiction, history, the possibility of surprise. We never learn why they chose sports medicine, whether they’re any good at it, what brought them from Minneapolis to Texas, whether they have friends or lovers or family who find them as exhausting as Sheridan does. They’re a type, not a person—and worse, they’re a type drawn by someone who has clearly never spent five minutes genuinely curious about why young people talk this way, what anxieties and aspirations drive the vocabulary of safe spaces and trigger warnings, how the genuine desire to make the world less cruel can calcify into joyless policing. Sheridan sees the surface and finds it ridiculous. That’s his right. But ridicule without curiosity produces propaganda, and propaganda makes for lousy television.

The aftermath completes the indictment. Angela, summoned by her daughter’s distress, swoops in and relocates Ainsley to luxury off-campus housing—a solution that costs a fortune the family may no longer have, since Tommy has just been fired. The show frames this as maternal love triumphant, a mother rescuing her baby from the clutches of campus lunacy. What it actually dramatizes is something uglier: the conviction that wealth entitles you to opt out of discomfort, that the negotiations and compromises ordinary people make are for suckers, that the correct response to encountering someone different is to buy your way into a bubble where difference can’t reach you. Ainsley learns nothing. Angela enables everything. And Sheridan seems to think this is a happy ending.

The roommate scene has sparked exactly the reaction Sheridan presumably wanted—outrage from progressives, applause from conservatives, engagement metrics through the roof. But reaction is cheap. Any hack can provoke a reaction by poking a bruise. The question is whether you’ve created something that lasts beyond the initial sting, something that illuminates rather than merely inflames. Sheridan, for all his undeniable gifts—the man can write a gunfight, can make you feel the weight of a landscape—has produced here something that will age like milk. In five years, Paigyn will scan as a time capsule of 2020s culture-war grievance, a character born not from imagination but from irritation. That’s the problem with writing villains out of spite: spite has a short shelf life, and the audience eventually notices you’ve been punching down all along.