An excellent Billy Bob Thornton heads up a starry, bloody tale of Texan oil magnates v drug cartels. Plus: Barack Obama’s startling underwater odyssey – and the return of a stone-cold 90s classic
Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) is a crisis executive for an oil giant colonising Texas and it’s a stressful job – especially when he is tied, hooded and bloodied while trying to negotiate a multibillion-dollar land lease with a drug cartel. This drama is loosely adapted from the Boomtown podcast, which explored the race to exploit the state’s Permian Basin oil fields. It’s a rough-handed, picaresque affair – there are huge sums of money at stake and everyone from the farmers occupying the land to the working stiffs seeking their fortunes fancy a piece of it. Thornton is excellent as the man trying to conduct the chaos, with Jon Hamm and Demi Moore among his illustrious co-stars.
Paramount+, from Monday 18 November