I Think I Love TULSA KING

Stallone's new mob show is way odder than you'd expect

Someone asked me a good question about Tulsa King: is it good-good or bad-good? There was only one reply I could give: Yes. 

The newest show in the rapidly growing empire of Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone, Yellowstone 1923, Yellowstone 1883, Yellowstone 2099), the Sylvester Stallone-starring Tulsa King is easily one of the strangest mainstream television shows I have ever watched. It’s hard to really sum up the tone of the show because I can’t quite get a grasp on it - every time I think I understand what the show is it dodges and weaves into another tonal area, it wriggles its way into something a little bit left of what I expected, and it gets very goofy in a very self aware way. 

Here’s the premise: Stallone is a mobster who has done 25 years in prison and kept his mouth shut the whole time. When he gets out he expects a party and a paycheck; instead he gets sent from New York City to Tulsa, Oklahoma to establish a Mafia beachhead. He’s furious at what he sees as a banishment but he’s also a good soldier, so he goes. He immediately - and friend, when I say immediately, I mean immediately. This show bucks modern TV storytelling trends and wastes no time getting its major players and scenarios set up within the first half hour - gets himself a driver/sidekick, takes over a local weed dispensary, finds a new regular hangout at a cowboy bar called Bred2Buck and sleeps with a woman who, it turns out, is an ATF agent. 

Sheridan isn’t the only creator on this one. He teamed up with Terence Winter, of The Sopranos and Wolf of Wall Street and Boardwalk Empire fame. These two together have created something absolutely unusual, something that feels like the unholy love child of prestige cable/streaming TV and the most basic broadcast show. It’s a show that looks like your grandmother could watch it that also features Stallone saying a grasshopper is bigger than his cock and later beating a man with a phone. 

First, the Stallone of it all. The guy is, according to all reliable reports, a piece of shit in real life, but on screen he’s a pretty great presence. He always has been, and every few years he likes to remind us why we fell for his goofy tough guy schtick all those years ago. His Dwight Manfredi is smarter and less sweet than Rocky but shares his charming tendency for tossed off mumbled jokes. There’s a fish out of water thing happening here, and at first it seems like half the show is going to be about Stallone catching up with the modern world (in episode two he gets stoned and rants about pronouns), but Tulsa King is doing the opposite - this fish is in new water, and the other fish are going to have to get used to it fast. Manfredi is in charge; he’s no dummy, even when he’s humorously befuddled. This is one of the things that works about the show and that makes it feel a little off-kilter - you keep expecting the joke to be that Manfredi doesn’t get something/is out of touch/doesn’t realize his New York shit won’t fly in Tulsa, but the joke is actually that he’s confusing and steamrolling all the locals. 

Something happens in the first episode that is hard to imagine happening in your standard Stallone-starrer - he sleeps with Andrea Savage’s (Veep, Step Brothers) character after a drunken night and when she learns he’s 75 she’s absolutely disgusted and immediately leaves his hotel room. Of course in future episodes we see that she’s magnetically attracted to this guy, which is likely how they convinced Stallone to do that scene where she almost pukes after hearing his age, but it’s still incredible. 

The supporting cast on this show is pretty great. Garrett Hedlund is the owner of Bred2Buck, an ex-con who is flying straight until Manfredi begins to rope him into his burgeoning criminal empire. Jay Will (Buffed Up! The Movie) is very charming in a role that feels like it’s walking a strange line - he’s Tyson, the young Black sidekick to Stallone, and the racial dynamic is strange at times. Still, it gives Manfredi the chance to show off his woke credentials by beating the shit out of a racist car dealer who wouldn’t sell Tyson a Navigator for cash. Then there’s Martin Starr as Bodhi, the owner of the dispensary that becomes the foundation stone of Manfredi’s burgeoning empire, and watching Sylvester Stallone physically threaten Starr is one of the most fundamentally entertaining things I have ever watched on television. It’s just so weird  - why is Rocky being so mean to Bill Haverchuck?!?

All of these terrific actors (as well as Max Casella as a mobster in the witness protection program who is freaked out to see Manfredi in Tulsa and Andrea Savage as the ATF agent/lover (and Dana Delaney, but as of this writing she has only been in one quick scene despite being in the opening credits every episode)) work to service a truly odd bit of weekly storytelling. Imagine if The Sopranos had been on CBS; in one episode Manfredi has to take a driving test to get a new Oklahoma driver’s license, and in the middle of the comedic sequence someone tries to kill him. The actors understand how to play this stuff lightly but straight; nobody’s mugging, but nobody’s treating this like it’s a prestige show either. 

Most appealing: the stakes so far are low. In the latest episode a white supremacist biker gang was introduced, and the sneak preview of next week’s episode indicates that they will come into conflict with Manfredi and his crew… over selling whippets at a local music festival. These stories might grow and get bigger (I suspect that the mob vs right wing insurgents is going to be a continuing storyline) but it’s the fact that they will grow that I like. It’s fun watching Manfredi getting set up in his new town, figuring out the angles, catching up with the world and learning how to rob, cheat and steal from it. 

The show isn’t just a comedy, though, and this is the other secret ingredient. It has serious storyline running through it - before he left New York Manfredi broke another capo’s jaw, so there’s tension with his Mob family, he hasn’t spoken to his daughter in 18 years and he wants to reconnect with her, Tyson’s dad is worried that his son is getting caught up in crime, Garret Hedlund’s dad with dementia hangs out at Bred2Buck so his son can keep an eye on him. The show does a great job of weaving these - often sentimental - storylines through the organized crime goofiness so that you end up with some emotional connection to the characters. By the end of the third episode I didn’t just like Dwight Manfredi, I absolutely wanted to see him win every single encounter he has.

When I say that this show is weird, don’t think I mean in a David Lynch way. There is a random horse that Manfredi sees wandering the streets of Tulsa… but it’s a real horse and everybody else sees it too. What’s weird about Tulsa King is the way that it takes exceptionally not weird things - prestige antihero storytelling, broadcast TV light drama - and mashes them together into something that defies expectations just enough. You’ll get lulled into thinking you know what the show is and then something will happen that will leave you kind of amazed that they actually went there. I don’t know how long the show can keep this highwire act up - by the third episode you feel it begin to settle into itself - but for now it’s a pretty great hour of television that doesn’t tax you too much but that also doesn’t feel like mindless garbage. At least once an episode I have found myself laughing in delight at some absurd twist, event or character. 

Usually I don’t write about shows before their first season is over; you never know where things are going, and it’s like reviewing a book two chapters in. But I have had such a good time watching this show that I want to spread the word that there’s something unique happening here. Whether it’s good or bad in the long run I have no idea, but in a TV universe where too many shows are all about wheel spinning, where each new series feels like a carbon copy of something else that came before (why even release Wednesday in a universe where The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina exists (on the same streamer!)), and where too many shows feel like background noise, Tulsa King is surprising and odd and just off-kilter enough to feel very much like its own thing.