3 Ways ‘Tulsa King’ is Similar to Other Taylor Sheridan Shows
Taylor Sheridan is best known for his westerns, be they the modern day Yellowstone or its prequels, 1883 and the upcoming 1923. His new show, Tulsa King, is a gangster tale, but it’s not so different from the rest of Sheridan’s work.
Showrunner Terrence Winter and star Sylvester Stallone spoke at a Television Critics Association Zoom panel for Tulsa King on Sept. 21. Here are the connections they saw to Sheridan’s other work. New episodes premiere Sundays on Paramount+.
Sylvester Stallone relates to ‘Tulsa King’ creator Taylor Sheridan
Sheridan writes stories about men in violent professions, be they police and bank robbers in Hell or High Water or FBI agents and hitmen in Sicario. The cowboys of 1883 deal with violent bandits too.
“I think we’re both kind of definitely steeped in the alpha tradition where life is hard,” Stallone said. “And not just like it’s a man’s world, but I’ve always looked at trying to overcome odds. And the character is put in a situation where he has to start over at a very late point in life. So there’s a story there. But Taylor and I look at life maybe in a short-handed way. Most people get what life is about, so we don’t have to do a great deal of exposition, and we stick to the gems that I think the audience can relate to.”
‘Tulsa King’ is still part western
Winter said Sheridan explicitly wanted to combine the gangster genre with the western.
“Taylor’s original concept was the mixing of these two tried and true genres,” Winter said. “You’ve obviously got the western and gangster genre. And I said, ‘Guys, it reminds me of those Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercials where the peanut butter truck crashed into the chocolate truck and now you’ve got something that’s better than the two separate things. You have two genres, and that was just so much fun. I mean, you’ve taken a New York mobster and put him in the west and just let it play out. For me, right out of the gate, was like, wow, what a playground. It was really fun.”
There’s a bit of ‘Yellowstone’ in the show
It’s not a stretch to compare Tulsa King to Yellowstone. Stallone did so with Sheridan himself.
“I was just talking to Taylor this morning about that,” Stallone said. “The more the audience can say, ‘Oh, that’s kind of what I’m going through. I didn’t think a gangster went through that,’ or ‘I didn’t think that Stacy or that character or Mitch would go through those particular dilemmas,’ yeah, we do. We all are bound for the common frailties and fraughts of man. And so, in this long-winded dissertation here, it’s very, very relatable, kind of like Yellowstone. People get Yellowstone because they understand the dynamics of what these characters are going through.”
Tulsa is also part of the midwest milieu like Sheridan’s other work.
The goal was to take Dwight as far away from New York and his New York experience as possible, so there was many different possible locations for this. Tulsa felt perfect to me. It is really middle America. It’s as unlike New York City as you can possibly get. It’s a beautiful location, but you will not mistake it for anything but what it is. You are out in wide open skies with blue skies, and it’s wide open spaces everywhere. It just feels like you’re in a completely different place. So for a guy like Dwight, who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan, to walk out into that, and suddenly you’re in the middle of corn fields and cowboys and horses everywhere, was really as alien a landscape as we could possibly put him in. And of course we wanted to heighten his stakes as much as possible. So Tulsa was the greatest place.
Terrence Winter, Television Critics Association panel, 9/21/22
