A role that Stallone can sink teeth into
“Tulsa King” has mischievous fun baked into its casting and premise. A 76-year-old Sylvester Stallone plays Dwight “the General” Manfredi, a New York mafioso who finishes a 25-year prison bid only to discover his mob family has no more use for him. They exile him to Oklahoma, half-heartedly selling the venture as a grand opportunity.
So Dwight turns it into just that, crewing up with a group of misfits and outcasts as he adjusts to life both on the outside and in the Bible Belt.
It could practically write itself. Instead, Taylor Sheridan, creator of the “Yellowstone” empire, and Terence Winter, David Chase’s right hand on “The Sopranos,” lead the creative team. “Tulsa King” has high expectations written all over it, and for the most part, the two episodes made available to critics are a cackling good time, raucous even when the execution gets a little lazy.
Watching Stallone lord over the flat, strip mall-laden environs of Tulsa is a kick in the head, even if the Paramount+ series will eventually need to transcend its fish-out-of-water setup.
Part of the challenge is buying a Stallone character who reads Goethe’s “Faust” in prison, and uses words like “Rubicon” and “idiom.”
The language just sounds odd coming out of his mouth after a lifetime of playing bruising tough guys. He’s much more natural running a protection racket on a marijuana dispensary, applying an illegal mindset to an enterprise that Dwight can’t quite believe is now legal. Dwight actually does this on the way from the airport; soon he has hired his cabbie, Tyson ( Jay Will), to be his full-time driver and turned the dispensary owner, Bodhi (Martin Starr), into his partner in crime. He also beds a woman (Andrea Savage) he meets in a bar, not knowing she’s an ATF agent.
One of the show’s most effective conceits is that Dwight’s new people are not rubes. They’re opportunists who know how things run in Tulsa better than he does, a fact of which all parties are aware.
The butt of the show’s jokes, and of Dwight’s wrath, are the smallminded suckers, like a car dealer who won’t sell Tyson a Lincoln Navigator (for Dwight) because he’s a Black man paying cash. Meanwhile, Dwight has to figure out how to get an ATM card and a driver’s license; when he gets his picture taken for the latter, he turns to the side, as if he’s being booked into prison. Old habits die hard.
The challenge for “Tulsa King” will be to expand beyond the “What a great idea!” stage. Right now it’s trying to be a whole lot of things at once: mob comedy; fishout-of-water story; family drama (Dwight wants to reconnect with his estranged daughter); smalltime-crooks yarn. It has plenty of time to make room for all of that, and the dynamite premise and talent pool isn’t going anywhere.
But “Tulsa King” can’t rest on its laurels. Yo, y’all. This could get really good.