In case you haven’t noticed, in the last handful of years, writer/director/actor/producer Taylor Sheridan has largely refocused his talents from the big screen (he first rose to prominence as the Oscar-nominated screenwriter behind tremendous movies like Sicario and Hell or High Water) to the small screen, where his neo-western Yellowstone has become one of television’s most-watched shows and spawned several spinoffs (including 1883 and the forthcoming 1923)along the way.
But Sheridan isn’t just focusing on the story of Yellowstone’s Dutton family. Like fellow TV moguls Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes, and Dick Wolf, Sheridan is making his imprint all across the board. Last year, he debuted the Jeremy Renner-starring Mayor of Kingstown, a crime drama set in a prison town, and this year he’s got another treat: Tulsa King, a mafia-centered series that stars everyone’s favorite boxer/action hero—Sylvester Stallone—as a mob capo who was just released from prison and has to set up shop in the titular midwestern city.
Tulsa King follows in Kingstown’s footsteps by debuting on Paramount+ and being paired for release with Sheridan’s flagship series, Yellowstone. But it also follows a formula that has worked for Sheridan in just about every show: a charismatic, recognizable lead (in Tulsa’s case it’s Stallone, in Kingstown it’s Renner, and in Yellowstone it’s Kevin Costner) who anchors the show with a plot that generally finds some kind of culture clash as its main conflict.
Tulsa King finds Sheridan working with showrunner Terence Winter—who wroteThe Wolf of Wall Street and was the showrunner for HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and Vinyl—and is quick to get its premise going. The series opens with Dwight Manfredi (Stallone) being released from prison in New York, ready to start a new chapter of his life at a cool 75 years old. It doesn’t take him long to meet his bosses in Long Island and learn that things have changed; he’s being sent out to Tulsa to make a new wing of the crime empire we’re being told exists.
Dwight seems to do just about whatever he wants once he gets to Tulsa, from hiring a random cabbie as his personal driver to taking over a Marijuana dispensary run by a sardonic fella named Bodhi (Martin Starr) with ease. Stallone pretty much does the tough guy act he’s perfected over the last 50 years and it’s certainly fun to watch, especially as he interacts with local characters like the saloon owner/bartender (Garrett Hedlund) and a party girl who may or may not be a little more than a party girl (played by the hilarious Andrea Savage in a rare dramatic role).
Sheridan takes his time setting any conflict or significant stakes up in Tulsa King, which is refreshing considering the fact that anyone who’s ever seen a show or movie like this knows that sooner or later the bullets are going to start flying and the blood is going to start flowing. Instead, Tulsa King actually has quite a few funny moments in the early going.
That’s worth enjoying, because now that the pair of Sheridan and Winter have quite a few shows under their belts, they know that they aren’t making their money with jokes—the violence and drama will come.
When is the next episode of Tulsa King coming out?
All nine Season 1 episodes are now streaming on Paramount+.
How many episodes of Tulsa King are left?
While Mayor of Kingstown, last year’s unrelated-to-Yellowstone entry into the Paramount+ Taylor Sheridan-verse, had a 10-episode Season 1, Tulsa King will go just a bit shorter, at 9 episodes, all of which are now streaming.