Who Is Cheyenne on Landman? T.L.’s Unexpected Physical Therapist (and Rick’s Cabaret Hire)
Cheyenne enters Landman at the exact moment Season 2 leans hardest into family damage. The show has already set up Tommy Norris as a man who solves problems fast. He often solves them awkwardly. In Season 2, Episode 8, that habit collides with the most personal storyline of the season.
That episode, titled “Handsome Touched Me,” premiered on January 4, 2026 on Paramount+. Paramount+ lists it at 50 minutes and rates it TV-MA. The official episode description is short but telling: “Tommy hires help for his father as Cami makes a risky move.” That “help” is Cheyenne.
The exact episode where Cheyenne arrives (and why it matters)
Cheyenne’s debut is not a blink-and-miss cameo. She shows up as part of a deliberate choice Tommy makes for T.L. (Tommy’s father). Several recaps of S2E8 describe the same setup. Tommy goes to Rick’s Cabaret, meets Cheyenne there, and recruits her for a job connected to T.L.’s recovery.
The key factual beats line up across outlets like Ready Steady Cut, SoapCentral, and The Cinemaholic. They all identify Cheyenne as an exotic dancer at Rick’s Cabaret. They also agree Tommy hires her to help T.L. physically, in a role framed as “physical therapist” help even though it clearly does not resemble a conventional medical hire.
That distinction is the point. SoapCentral puts the motivation bluntly in its recap. Tommy chooses Cheyenne specifically because he thinks a typical physical therapist would hurt T.L.’s pride. So Tommy recruits someone T.L. might actually accept in the moment, even if the choice looks outrageous on paper.
There are also hard production details worth keeping in your back pocket, because they place Cheyenne’s introduction inside the official Season 2 endgame. TheTVDB credits Taylor Sheridan as the writer of “Handsome Touched Me,” and it credits Stephen Kay as director. TheTVDB also matches Paramount+ on the 50-minute runtime and lists the original air date as January 4, 2026.
One quick timing note: streaming guides sometimes disagree about the exact hour episodes drop. A Men’s Journal guide describes a 12:00 a.m. Eastern release time pattern. Other schedule trackers commonly use a different midnight convention. The safest confirmed detail is the date, which Paramount+ and multiple listings align on.
Who Cheyenne is on-screen: a Rick’s Cabaret worker pulled into the Norris orbit
Cheyenne’s “who” is inseparable from “where.” Landman introduces her as a worker at Rick’s Cabaret, and the show treats that location as a recognizable piece of the series’ West Texas texture.
Recaps of “Handsome Touched Me” describe Tommy visiting Rick’s Cabaret and meeting Cheyenne there. Ready Steady Cut calls her a pole dancer. SoapCentral calls her an exotic dancer. The Cinemaholic also frames her as a dancer at the club. Those descriptions all point to the same idea: Cheyenne comes from a workplace that makes Tommy’s “healthcare” plan feel half practical and half like a dare.
Then the episode escalates the premise. Ready Steady Cut reports that Tommy hires Cheyenne to be T.L.’s physical therapist twice a week. It also describes Cheyenne “freestyling” aquatherapy in a pool. The Cinemaholic echoes the pool-based therapy angle and describes Cheyenne cradling T.L. in the water as part of that work.
Those details matter because they show what the writers are doing. They are not hiding Cheyenne behind vague language. They introduce her with a specific job background, a specific recruitment location, and a specific (if unconventional) therapy routine.
Cheyenne also arrives during an episode that keeps stacking high-stakes decisions around the Norris family. Ready Steady Cut’s recap describes a major corporate gamble in the same hour: a $400 million drilling play, framed as having a 10% chance of success. In other words, “Handsome Touched Me” is already about risky bets. Cheyenne becomes a personal-scale version of that theme.
The emotional reason Tommy hires her, and why Season 2 is built for this kind of choice
Cheyenne’s introduction lands harder when you look at how Season 2 frames Tommy and T.L. as a pair. Entertainment Weekly published an interview on December 29, 2025 that digs into the father-son dynamic between Billy Bob Thornton (Tommy) and Sam Elliott (T.L.). The quotes do not mention Cheyenne by name, but they explain the emotional terrain that makes a Cheyenne-style storyline believable.
Thornton describes how family history clings to people even when they try to move forward:
“In any family, if there’s a history that’s been difficult and you try to come back together, it’s hard to shed a lot of it… But that gives us somewhere to go in this show.”
He also emphasizes the weight of the relationship:
“Family stuff, it goes deep and it sticks in your soul. It’s a very heavy relationship.”
Elliott frames T.L. as a man who starts Season 2 in a bad place, with room to climb:
“There’s quite an arc to be played out with his character… He starts at a very low point in his life…”
Then he adds the emotional goal in simpler terms:
“[It’s] a chance to come around and heal a little bit.”
That word, “heal,” is doing a lot of work for a plotline like Cheyenne’s. Tommy isn’t just patching a body. He is trying to keep his father from sinking further. Christian Wallace, the show’s co-creator, also points to the odd-couple humor in the household setup:
“There’s also a lot of humor in the way that T.L. is now thrust into this crazy household…”
Cheyenne fits that tonal promise. She is tied to something serious, physical recovery. Yet the way she enters the story invites comedy and discomfort at the same time.
Who plays Cheyenne? The verified casting credit
The role of Cheyenne is credited to actress Francesca Xuereb. You can confirm that in more than one place. Metacritic lists Xuereb’s Landman credit as “Actor (as Cheyenne).” IMDb’s character credit page also labels Xuereb as Cheyenne.
The other useful piece, especially for January 2026 coverage, is that Cheyenne does not appear to be a one-episode device. IMDbPro’s listing for Xuereb indicates she appears as Cheyenne in 3 episodes (2026). That same listing explicitly includes the Season 2 finale, titled “Tragedy and Flies,” dated January 18, 2026.
That credit count gives you a clean factual way to frame Cheyenne as part of the closing stretch of Season 2. She enters in Episode 8 on January 4, 2026. She continues beyond that point. And she remains relevant through the finale window.
If you want to anchor the final run with dates, TVmaze lists the last three Season 2 episode dates like this:
- Episode 8, “Handsome Touched Me”: Jan. 4, 2026
- Episode 9, “Plans, Tears and Sirens”: Jan. 11, 2026
- Episode 10, “Tragedy and Flies”: Jan. 18, 2026
That schedule matters because it shows why Cheyenne became a talking point in early January. She arrives right as the season aims toward its finish.
Rick’s Cabaret in Landman: not new, but newly important
Cheyenne’s workplace also connects to a longer-running show choice. Rick’s Cabaret is not introduced for the first time in Season 2. A recap of Season 1, Episode 9 (“WolfCamp”) describes Angela and Ainsley going to Rick’s Cabaret as part of a plan to hire erotic dancers for a retirement-home entertainment idea.
So by the time Cheyenne arrives in Season 2, Rick’s already functions as a recurring Landman setting. That continuity makes Cheyenne’s entrance feel less like a random detour. It also suggests the writers view Rick’s as a storytelling hub, a place where oilfield money, personal chaos, and side deals intersect.
There is also real-world context for the name. Rick’s Cabaret is an actual brand. The official Rick’s Cabaret site says the brand was founded in 1983. RCI Hospitality Holdings, tied to the Rick’s Cabaret brand, notes it trades on NASDAQ under the symbol RICK. A 2019 PRNewswire release about Rick’s Cabaret expansion lists locations including Odessa and “two in Dallas-Fort Worth,” among others.
None of that proves Landman uses a specific real club location on-screen. The show does not, in the sources above, confirm a street address. Still, the real-world footprint helps explain why “Rick’s Cabaret” reads like a deliberate West Texas-adjacent choice, not a generic fictional name.
What Cheyenne’s storyline does for Season 2’s themes
Cheyenne’s job offer is a character reveal for Tommy as much as it is for her. It shows how Tommy mixes compassion with blunt-force problem solving. He wants to help his father. He also wants results fast. So he chooses a helper who might cut through T.L.’s resistance, even if the decision looks socially explosive.
It also underlines how Landman keeps pairing massive financial risk with personal risk. In the same episode where recaps describe a $400 million play with 10% odds, Tommy makes a smaller bet. He wagers that Cheyenne can reach T.L. in a way a conventional physical therapist cannot.
One more number from the episode’s recap ecosystem highlights the hour’s obsession with money swinging wildly. Ready Steady Cut describes Angela borrowing $10,000 and returning with over $300,000 in winnings. That kind of swing fits the show’s worldview. Things escalate quickly in Landman, whether you are drilling wells or improvising rehab.
What this means going forward (sticking to what we can verify)
The safest confirmed takeaway is simple: Cheyenne is not a one-scene novelty. Verified credits indicate she appears in three episodes in 2026, and that run includes the Season 2 finale on January 18, 2026.
Everything beyond that becomes interpretation. Still, the facts already suggest why fans latched onto her. Cheyenne enters at a pressure point in the Norris family story. She also ties into a recurring location the show has used before. And she brings a kind of uneasy humor that Christian Wallace explicitly flagged as part of T.L.’s “crazy household” experience.
If you want to watch the exact episode that introduces her, start with Paramount+’s listing for S2E8, “Handsome Touched Me” (Jan. 4, 2026), then track forward through the remaining two January episodes. That’s where Cheyenne becomes part of the season’s closing shape.
Essential links (2):
- Paramount+ episode page for “Handsome Touched Me” (Season 2, Episode 8): https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/video/a9isDhj2lmk58bwezi8rcO5HrRzKnWsI/
- Entertainment Weekly interview on Tommy and T.L.’s father-son dynamic (Dec. 29, 2025): https://ew.com/billy-bob-thornton-sam-elliott-heavy-father-son-dynamic-landman-season-2-11856618/
