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Sylvester Stallone’s Tulsa King makes its broadcast debut after streaming on Paramount+

CBS has seen some serious success in the past by airing shows that had previously debuted on Paramount+ — a win-win, given that both the broadcast network and the streaming service are owned by the same parent company.

Thanks to the ratings that Yellowstone drew when the series ran on the network last year, to say nothing of the star power of Sylvester Stallone, CBS is giving a broadcast run to another series that originated on Paramount+.

Created by Yellowstone’s Taylor Sheridan, Tulsa King made its streaming debut back in November 2022. With its second season set to arrive on Paramount+ this summer, the humour-filled mob drama comes to CBS, with weekly airings of the show’s first season beginning this week.

Tulsa King on CBS. Pictured: Sylvester Stallone plays Dwight Mandredi, an underworld-family deputy newly released from a 25-year prison sentence.
Brian Douglas/Paramount+

This repurposing of shows that have already been seen on other platforms helped broadcast networks get through last year’s shortage of new content, brought about by the actors’ and writers’ strikes, and the strong ratings notched by Yellowstone made it a no-brainer to do the same with Tulsa King.

Also an executive producer of the series along with Sheridan, Stallone plays Dwight “The General” Manfredi, an underworld-family deputy newly released from a 25-year prison sentence. Expecting to be rewarded for his loyalty to his New York-based bosses, he’s sent to alien-to-him Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he assembles a crew of criminals from scratch.

Martin Starr, Jay Will, Max Casella and Garrett Hedlund play some of Manfredi’s new associates; Andrea Savage, Domenick Lombardozzi, Vincent Piazza and Dana Delany also star.

Tulsa King on CBS. Pictured: Sylvester Stallone plays Dwight Mandredi, an underworld-family deputy newly released from a 25-year prison sentence.
Brian Douglas/Paramount+

During a virtual news conference for Tulsa King’s original debut, Stallone explained that he had met Sheridan sometime earlier, “riding horses in California. He was working on [the 2015 movie] Sicario at the time, and I wanted him to write the screenplay for Rambo: Last Blood, because I was getting lazy.” (Stallone ultimately did co-write that script.) “Anyway, we moved on in life, then he became very, very successful with Yellowstone. And one day, he just had this idea, called me up and pitched it to me in, like, three seconds. And I went, ‘I’m in.’ It was very fast.”

Stallone says that after he was rejected to be an extra in the 1972 classic The Godfather, he still had tried “to get in gangster films, and it just never happened. Finally, everything comes to those who wait.”

The appeal of portraying Dwight, Stallone explained, is that he’s far from a stereotypical mobster. “I wanted to play a different interpretation of a gangster,” he explained. “This is a fellow who’s very educated, who reads Marcus Aurelius, who reads Plato. He’s into Machiavelli. He’s also into the classics. He’s a different animal than you would normally see in a ‘gangster’ film.”

Though he did television early in his career (with guest roles on Kojak and Police Story) and played himself on This Is Us, Stallone — who’s also featured in the unscripted series The Family Stallone for Paramount+ — notes that doing television now is “harder, faster and longer. You really have to be quick. You have to work out of sync a lot of times with sequences that don’t follow the natural order of things. But most importantly, you have to keep your energy up.”

He added: “Put it this way: The amount of time that we did 10 episodes [of Tulsa King] is the equivalent of doing five Rockys in a row, five two-hour films with no break in between. I had great respect for the crew in their diligence and endurance.”

Tulsa King airs Sunday, July 15 on CBS

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