Yellowstone creator Tulsa King’s Stallone Show has no idea how funny it is

There are two reasons Paramount Plus hopes to see you Tulsa King. The first is hard to miss: it stars Sylvester Stallone, one of the few seventy-year-old brick homes that walk the earth, his first role in a television series. The second is creator Taylor Sheridan, the man behind the outstanding TV series yellowstone and its growing number of spinoffs (including Tulsa King is not one…yet.) Together these two names suggest a mood, and that mood is masculine men man show.

To be clear: this would be an accurate reading. Tulsa King is more of a relaxed exercise in masculinity than Sheridan’s other creations, but it’s the only real thing that drives it. Think less of a flowing testosterone tap and more of an espresso sipped casually. The real reason to watch Tulsa Kinghowever, is quite simple – it’s funny as hell, and it’s not clear if any of it is intentional.

Tulsa Kings Premise is a direct-play fish-out-of-water comedy that follows Dwight Manfredi (Stallone), a former New York mob capo who ends a 25-year sentence only to find that no one else can take him wants. He’s been relegated to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in a little positive spin he’s told to settle down there. It’s funny, Dwight absolutely committed to.

As soon as he arrives, he pretends to be the star of his own gangster movie, flashes around with cash, pays a cab driver, Tyson (Jay Will), to work exclusively for him, and, funniest of all, he goes to one legal cannabis dispensary to run a protection scam to protect them from “the law”. This part of the show is played for comedy and helps wry comedy expert Martin Starr (Silicon Valley) appears in it as Bohdi, the unfortunate pharmacy owner.

The rest of Tulsa King, although? It’s impossible to tell if you’re laughing at it or with him. Part of this is due to the history of its creator. yellowstone, Tulsa King‘s Sheridan-created sister show is a series built in part on clowning about those who hail from the big cities and find that their flashy success in the heart of Real America is all for nothing. It laughs at anyone who would choose chinos over blue jeans and shred Kendall Roy’s Sperry Topsiders over a bowl of bran flakes for flavor. In other words, Dwight Manfredi doesn’t seem cut out for Sheridan’s world and the dissonances Tulsa KingPilot is written in Manfredi and listed to be absolute doesn’t seem to get it.

There are moments when Tulsa King‘s first episode seems like a show about reaching down the aisle, so to speak, especially when he walks into a cowboy bar and compliments a man’s alligator boots and also lifts his own Italian leather loafers for inspection. At other moments it seems so Tulsa King It’s about a man who, in his (gentleman’s) image, cleans up a town like going to a strip club and making sure a ladies’ bachelorette party has a good time by paying the owner and beating up a local creep. And others are just about what happens when a mobster shows up in a place no one expects him to be either, like when Dwight punches up a used car dealer for being racist towards his driver, Tyson (and the show’s only black character). ).

Tulsa King, in other words, contains a lot. It’s a Scenes from a Hat game masquerading as a TV show in which someone suggests what Sylvester Stallone should do next in small town Oklahoma, and then he goes off and does it. It’s convincing nonsense and Muscular Sophism, a series starring one of our greatest meatheads (who is capable of a lot of more than his biggest critics often claim) uses two phrases and a small ring in a variety of situations, and produces art every time. There’s not much out there like it, and it’s exciting to know that it could stop being as entertaining as it is at basically any moment. Until then? Long live the king of Tulsa.