--- title: "Billy Bob Thornton stays on Landman and hosts a Mayflower docudrama arriving November 23" url: https://badiyaa.com/billy-bob-thornton-landman-mayflower-docudrama/ published: 2026-11-01T00:41:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-01T00:41:00+00:00 section: Entertainment publisher: Badiyaa --- # Billy Bob Thornton stays on Landman and hosts a Mayflower docudrama arriving November 23 Paramount+ confirmed Landman season 3 production on October 1 with Thornton still leading as Tommy Norris; his three-part Mayflower series was filmed partly at Plimoth Patuxet. Billy Bob Thornton has not been replaced on *Landman*, and he is not walking away from it either. The real news is a side project: the Oscar winner will host a three-part docudrama about the Mayflower that starts streaming on November 23, the week of Thanksgiving, while cameras roll on season 3 of the oil drama in Texas. Posts circulating this week claimed Thornton had “officially” replaced the show. What actually changed is that Tommy Norris now shares his star’s calendar with the Pilgrims. ## Where Landman stands Paramount+ confirmed on October 1 that production on season 3 had begun, and the streamer lists Thornton at the top of the returning cast as Tommy. Demi Moore, Ali Larter, Sam Elliott, Andy Garcia, Jacob Lofland and Michelle Randolph are back as well. Michael Kelly joins as William Crockett, billed as the head of “the largest oil management firm in the world.” Thornton has also said in an interview that he is signed to the series for “four or five years.” We covered the earlier round of replacement chatter on October 15, when [season 3 filming in Texas](https://badiyaa.com/landman-season-3-billy-bob-thornton-cooper-replacement/) already pointed the other way. The demand is there. Paramount+ renewed the show on December 5 last year after the season 2 premiere drew 9.2 million streams in its first two days, a 262% jump on the season 1 debut and the biggest opening yet for a Paramount+ original. Season 2 ended with Tommy fired from M-Tex by Cami and launching a new family-run Norris company, with the drug boss Gallino as his partner. No premiere date has been set. Executive producer Stephen Kay offered only this: “We’re cutting while we’re shooting, so it’ll, hopefully, be out soon.” ## The Mayflower project *Billy Bob Thornton Presents: The Mayflower* has Thornton guiding viewers through the 1620 crossing, the First Thanksgiving and the uneasy relationship between the English settlers and the Wampanoag people, including the violence that came later. He is also an executive producer. Parts of the series were filmed at Plimoth Patuxet Museums in Massachusetts, whose historians advised the production, as did Nathaniel Philbrick, author of the history *Mayflower*. “The voyage of the Mayflower set into motion what would become the United States,” Philbrick said in a statement about the series. The streaming service’s president, Lauren Petterson, called Thornton “a captivating storyteller with a unique ability to bring history to life.” History is familiar ground for him. Thornton played Davy Crockett in *The Alamo*, and his screenplay for *Sling Blade* won him the Academy Award. ## The voyage in numbers For anyone who last met the Pilgrims in a school play, the basics behind the series look like this: - **The ship:** an English merchant vessel roughly 110 feet long and 25 feet wide. - **Aboard:** 102 passengers and a crew of about 30. - **The crossing:** about 10 weeks, ending at anchor near the tip of Cape Cod on November 21, 1620, by today’s calendar. - **The first winter:** only about half of the original Pilgrims survived it, after disease swept the settlement. - **The harvest:** the following fall, survivors marked the colony’s first harvest alongside 90 Wampanoag people, the occasion later called the first American Thanksgiving. That puts the docudrama’s November 23 premiere 406 years and two days after the Mayflower first dropped anchor off Cape Cod, counting from November 21, 1620. Fans waiting for Tommy Norris get a different Thornton first. All three Mayflower episodes arrive together on November 23, and *Landman* keeps filming. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Mayflower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayflower) *Image: kubacheck, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*