Tulsa King, Paramount+’s hit neo-Western crime dramedy from creator Taylor Sheridan, showrunner Terence Winter, and star Sylvester Stallone, recently completed its fun and surprisingly heartfelt first season, and it’s already been renewed for Season 2. Stallone stars as Dwight “the General” Manfredi, a New York City mobster who gets shipped off to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to pursue new criminal opportunities for his family. Along the way, he makes new friends, figures out what’s really important to him, visits the house where Mickey Mantle grew up, and kills a few people. It’s very entertaining, and Sylvester Stallone is having a great time playing a loquacious mafioso for the first time in his storied career.
While you wait for Season 2, we’ve rounded up some similar shows to watch in the meantime. The list includes other fish-out-of-water mob dramedies (there’s more than one!), crime dramas that will make you laugh, and other shows made by some of the people behind Tulsa King. None of them feature Sylvester Stallone learning how to use the internet, but they’re almost as good.
The Sopranos
All right, this is a super-obvious show to start the list with, and chances are you’ve already watched it, but it’s always worth watching again — or for the first time, if somehow you haven’t seen the show that changed TV forever by being better than any show that came before. Tulsa King showrunner Terence Winter wrote numerous episodes of The Sopranos, and you can see the connection, not only in the antiheroic crime drama part, but in the comedy part, too. The Sopranos is one of the funniest shows of all time! (Winter’s other show, Boardwalk Empire, is also great, but since it’s a period piece that isn’t as funny as The Sopranos or Tulsa King, it’s different enough to not make the list.)
Lilyhammer
Speaking of The Sopranos, the premise of Lilyhammer is basically “What if Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) went to Norway?” Netflix’s first-ever series is TV’s original fish-out-of-water mafia dramedy that came out back when Taylor Sheridan was still just an actor. Little Steven stars as Frank “The Fixer” Tagliano, a New York City mobster who goes into witness protection in Lillehammer, Norway, and gets involved in all kinds of scams and schemes with the locals, who view his black hair and New York Italian American attitude as something exotic. Sounds familiar, right?
Vincenzo
America and Norway don’t have a monopoly on fish-out-of-water mafia dramedies. This South Korean series tells the story of antihero Vincenzo Cassano (Song Joong-ki), a Korean-born Italian lawyer and mafia consigliere who heads to Seoul when things go sideways with his family in Italy. He’s trying to recover some gold stashed in the basement of an office building, and will use legal and illegal means to do it. The series was massively popular in Korea. It’s obviously a very different style of show than Tulsa King, but if you’re only used to extremely American shows like the ones Taylor Sheridan makes, Vincenzo can be your gateway to the wide and wonderful world of K-dramas.
Get Shorty
One more fish-out-of-water mob dramedy for you. This one, inspired by a 1995 movie of the same name, stars Chris O’Dowd as Miles Daly, a dissatisfied, movie-loving enforcer for an organized crime operation based in Pahrump, Nevada, who goes to Hollywood on a debt collection job and meets Rick Moreweather (Ray Romano), a down-on-his-luck indie movie producer. Together, they decide to launder money through a movie they make together. It’s a very fun, very underrated dark comedy that Tulsa King fans will feel at home with, because it has a similar tone and visual style (both shows’ pilots were directed by Allen Coulter, a TV veteran who also directed many episodes of The Sopranos).
Justified
Like Get Shorty, Justified is an adaptation of a novel by highly influential crime writer Elmore Leonard. Like Tulsa King, it’s a witty, gritty neo-Western crime series set in an off-the-beaten-path corner of America you don’t usually see on TV. The great Timothy Olyphant stars as Raylan Givens, a U.S. Marshal from Harlan County, Kentucky, tasked with using his insider knowledge of the mountains, hollers, and people of this part of Appalachia to track down fugitives from justice. And he has his own ideas about justice. It’s a ton of fun, and a pretty clear influence on Tulsa King’s tone.
The Flight Attendant
Tulsa King stars Sylvester Stallone in his first starring TV role, showing off his range by playing a character a little different than any he’s played before. Kaley Cuoco is a TV star through and through, but The Flight Attendant is her version of a crime dramedy that shows off everything she’s capable of. Cuoco plays Cassie Bowden, an alcoholic flight attendant with a knack for getting caught up in international conspiracies she has to unravel before she turns up dead. If you like purely entertaining crime dramas with bursts of shocking violence and a whole lot of laughs — and if you like Tulsa King, you do — you should check this one out next.