As the creator of the “Yellowstone” franchise, Taylor Sheridan’s notions of masculinity are not what you’d call expansive, but instead sit comfortably within the same mold that produced John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. A similar but distinctive brand of masculinity exists in stories about the mob. With “Tulsa King” on Paramount+, Sheridan teams up with “Sopranos” and “Boardwalk Empire” alum Terence Winter to combine these two archetypes into a single show starring Sylvester Stallone as an aging but still buff New Yorker, fresh out of the joint, who is sent to Tulsa — banished, really, by his Italian American business associates — to establish a money-making scheme in Oklahoma. That’s the premise: A Mafioso fish out of water.
So he falls back on what he knows — the drug game — but it comes with a twist, since pot is legalized: He barges into a dispensary and informs the owner (a wet noodle of a guy played by Martin Starr) that he will now be paying protection money whether he likes it or not, to the tune of 20% of his profits.
Sheridan and Winter have given Stallone’s character an unnecessarily fussy moniker: Dwight “The General” Manfredi — his first name a nod to Eisenhower, given to him by his immigrant parents embracing Americana, but not the Americana that interested Dwight.
