A roughneck in the patch typically works 14 ... To keep things simple — or not — anything and everything in the oil field can be referred to as a “deal” by potbellied old-timers.

One area seems a bit too tragic to be true, however: the dangers of working an oilfield. By the ending of Landman episode 2, the show had already killed three roughnecks in a massive blowout.

Unsatisfied, he left school and hitchhiked West, where he worked as a roughneck in the Wyoming oil patch. He learned rigs from the ground up before earning a Geology degree at the University of ...