Here’s the thing: a few months ago when I signed up for Paramount Plus specifically to watch Tulsa King for this story, I couldn’t find anybody—not a single person—in my life who’d watched Tulsa King all the way through.
I found people who’d started watching it and quit. I found people who met cast members during production of the show in Tulsa and Oklahoma City and expressed no interest in actually watching it. I even found people who worked on the show’s production and quit their jobs midway through. But mostly I found other people like me, who were keenly aware of Tulsa King’s existence but uninformed as to its content. A void in our collective Tulsa knowledge had formed, taking for itself the ovular shape of one of Sylvester Stallone’s pectorals.
How could this be? How could a TV show that opened to 3.7 million viewers register a cultural dud among the citizens of our modest hamlet, which served as the show’s setting? Especially when it used incentives created by the Filmed in Oklahoma Act of 2021 and boosted the state’s economy before relocating to Atlanta to shoot its second season?
The plainly obvious answer to this question is that Tulsa King is a Taylor Sheridan property, which is to say not for us. Sheridan’s a libertarian Texas theater kid known for cranking out pages at an untenable pace.1 He made the rare jump from actor to mogul by developing massively popular entertainment properties, namely Yellowstone, its attendant spinoffs 1883 and 1923, Landman, and Mayor of Kingstown. He’s also written and directed movies, holding credits on Sicario, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, and Hell or High Water, to name a few. What these titles all share is an appeal to the male gaze. Sheridan’s tendencies are macho, western, rigid in their idea of masculinity and often willing to indulge cruelty toward his cultural enemies.
Tulsa King is noticeably less ambitious and less serious in tone than other Sheridan productions. If Yellowstone is The Godfather in Montana, as Sheridan reportedly pitched it, then Tulsa King is Dallas for the streaming era: a melodramatic soap about a small business and the people who run it. And while Sicario proposed the big, terrifying idea of an endlessly violent, perpetually surveilled American frontier, Tulsa King invites the fellas to unwind and enjoy a few cheap laughs at the end of a long day of work. This is schlocky TV for the sixth-largest American video streaming platform, which recently bent the knee to Donald Trump.
What I was most curious about when I committed to watching Tulsa King in its 19-episode entirety, was its depiction of our city within the show—how Tulsa actually appears onscreen. The whole viewing experience was dreadful, but this aspect was particularly strange. Let’s start there.
Dud Meridian
Credit where it’s due: Taylor Sheridan’s central working conceit—that the new west is devouring the old west—has the juice. Cormac McCarthy made a career telling much better versions of that narrative than Yellowstone and its spinoffs, but the two writers’ catalogs do share a lexicon: war stories, the anxieties and regrets of old men, a tenderness for horses and an abiding respect for the power of the natural world.2