Tulsa King · Season 1 · Episode 1 · 13 November 2022
S1E1 Pilot
THE MOMENT Dwight's first Tulsa bar fight - staged not as action spectacle but as the specific quality of a man who learned his violence 25 years ago, applied to a situation he doesn't fully understand.
Tulsa King's premiere drops Sylvester Stallone's Dwight 'The General' Manfredi into Tulsa, Oklahoma after 25 years in prison, assigned to establish a mob outpost for the New York family that abandoned him. The pilot is a fish-out-of-water premise executed with the competence Stallone's late-career television turn brings: Dwight's specific combination of violence and outdated chivalry is established in the first...
Full episode analysis below. Spoiler-light verdict above.
Updated
Tulsa King's pilot is precisely what it promises: a Stallone vehicle that finds a late-career register for its star in the streaming era. Dwight Manfredi's arrival in Tulsa after 25 years in prison is played as a comedy of displacement - a made man in a city that has no context for him - that escalates naturally into the pilot's violent conclusion. At 80% RT for Season 1, the series earned its critical response from the pilot's clarity of purpose: this is not ambitious television but it is very good at its specific ambitions. Taylor Sheridan's creation gives Stallone the kind of character that works with rather than against his screen presence. The Paramount+ series found a larger-than-expected audience because the pilot delivered on its premise without overcomplication.