I have only been to the United States once, and unlike Rome or Great Yarmouth, have never had a strong desire to go back. Two recent series on Paramount have confirmed me in this view, and that was even before Trump began demanding that you exhume your grandparents for DNA samples if you want to enter the country. Landman is set in the Texas oil region, and you can probably work out where Tulsa King is set.

They are both entertaining enough in their way if you fast forward through the inevitable love interest, but they are very definitely TV for the Trump base. Sylvester Stallone’s comic book mafia boss in Tulsa King buries someone alive, but it is alright because he is a terrorist.  He also ties a business rival to a tree before burning him alive. We are invited to approve of this because Stallone walks around with a ludicrous jewelled American flag pinned to his lapel. If you want the moral complexity of The Sopranos, fuhgeddaboudit.

Billy Bob Thornton is the star of Landman and is a wonderfully charismatic presence on screen as Tommy Norris. He is something like an operations manager for an oil company. This is most definitely anti-woke TV. He always has a fag in his mouth and when he chops off his own fingertip rather than stay in hospital he goes straight back to work. Men are men in the Texas oil fields.

Men might be men in the oil rich Permian Basin, something which at least acknowledges that the world is more than 6000 years old, but even Benny Hill would have raised an eyebrow at how some of the women are presented. Tommy’s wife Angela, played by Ali Larter, has a menstrual cycle which makes her virtually homicidal every month and every screaming row is followed by tempestuous sex. Maybe that is a Texas thing, along with getting a cheery wave from a cop as you drive your car while being fellated. It probably isn’t as dangerous as it would be in Europe since everyone seems to get around in cars the size of houses.

His blonde daughter is shagging an Aryan looking football player and makes a eugenicist argument that the prettiest girls should breed with the best athletes. How Trump is that?

Scripted by oil and tobacco companies

A lot of people get killed in Landman. In the case of the fat, bearded, camouflage wearing arseholes driving around shooting at wild pigs for “fun”, you think “good, there are four votes lost to MAGA”. Similarly, when an oil company boss dies of a stress induced heart attack it is hard to feel even the teensiest bit of compassion. This does not make you a bad person.

More disturbing is the mortality rate among the oil workers and the complete absence of anything resembling even a trade union level of class consciousness.  In the first episode three workers get killed in an oil well explosion due to poorly maintained equipment. This is presented as an occupational hazard for a workforce which employs large numbers of former prisoners. Someone else gets crushed to death while standing on top of a consignment of steel pipe, something which does look quite risky to the untrained eye.

Beyond a sentimental camaraderie, there is no obvious sense of class solidarity and certainly no mention of how having a union might prevent this sort of thing. A few episodes on, the company lawyer sees her moral obligation as minimising the amount of compensation the families receive. It is considered the most natural thing in the world that bereaved families have to deal with scumbag oil companies and their scumbag lawyers without their own legal representation.

Landman makes no pretence at hiding its climate change denying ideology. On the couple of occasions where a character feebly observes that the oil industry is making the planet uninhabitable, they are shot down with oil industry talking points about China, how wind turbines are bad for birds and there is no feasible alternative. Every episode starts with a notice telling viewers that it contains product placement. This seems to be mostly for a low alcohol beer, but if tobacco companies, BP, Shell and Esso had been involved in writing the scripts they would not have done anything very differently.

A plot element involves Tommy going mano a mano with a Mexican drug cartel, the boss of which observes, not unreasonably, that they are both in the business of making money. Drug cartels are not nice people, but at least they are not in the business of rendering large parts of the world incapable of supporting human life.