Tulsa King Delivers Ridiculous Fun, But Isn’t Up to Taylor Sheridan’s Usual Standard

The premise of a mafia show starring Sylvester Stallone and written/directed by Taylor Sheridan, the man who gave us brilliant films like Sicario, Wind River, and Hell or High Water—and even the eminently watchable and occasionally great Yellowstone—seemed almost too good to be true, and I’m sorry to bear the bad news that, well… it absolutely is. The reality of Paramount+’s Tulsa King doesn’t match up to the promise, and that has to be the headline here. But if you’re in the market for Stallone in a role that can best be described as “Jack Reacher, but old and Italian,” you’re going to have some fun. And in the current TV landscape, you could do a lot worse than a good time.

Whether that paragraph is disappointing (and maybe aggravating) or not probably has to do with your expectations. First off, let’s talk Stallone. The man looks amazing for 76, more muscular and youthful than he has any right to be, but his acting has not necessarily improved with time. He carries himself in Tulsa King with a kind of grinning machismo, and he’s still got that brutish charm you remember, but there’s also a rigidity when he’s playing it serious, and his words don’t flow with the rough poetry of the old days. As the mobster Dwight Manfredi, who kept his mouth shut for 25 years in prison to protect his people, he comes off less like an actual character and more like an out-of-practice actor trying to act. That inevitably lowers the stakes from the start, and creates the immersion problem—it’s hard to actually get into this show, because on some level it all feels a little goofy.

Which, again, is not the worst thing in the world, provided you weren’t expecting world class drama. Unfortunately, that’s sort of what I was expecting, and when you’re in that boat, it gets tough to appreciate the consolation prize of what Tulsa King really is. It’s not all Stallone’s fault, either; the plotting is rough. Manfredi comes out of a prison to find a New York City that has no place for him, and the Invernizzi crime family to whom he showed decades of loyalty has decided to exile him to Tulsa with the mandate to make money. He breaks a jaw on that way out the door, but ultimately does as he’s told, and the narrative spirals from there.

One of his first moves is to storm into a marijuana dispensary and demand a cut of their earnings… which Bohdi, the shop owner played by Martin Starr, seems to just accept, even without much of an explanation from Manfredi about who he is or what authority he’s acting under. I’m not exactly an expert in the protection racket, but in the year 2022 it seems like this would be slightly more complicated. Next, he hires his cabbie Tyson as his personal driver (this poor character, played by Jay Will, doesn’t even get a last name in the first two episodes), and then he’s approached by a woman at a bar looking for a good time, they sleep together, and of course it turns out she’s an ATF agent. You get the picture here—it’s all a little lazy, a little slapdash, as if the writers trust you not to care very much about the story when you get to watch Stallone kick some ass.