Dwight Manfredi has lost everything again. That is the headline of the full “Tulsa King” season four trailer, which Paramount+ released on September 28th, and Sylvester Stallone delivers it in four flat words over a shot of a ruined bar: “Everything I own is gone.” The season premieres on Friday, October 16th. The trailer runs a little under two minutes, and it is the first real look at what the new season is about.
The September teaser was mostly mood. This trailer has a plot. Dwight is being squeezed by a politician and the police, by his own debts and by a new rival from the music business, and the closing title cards spell out the theme: “Every empire has a price.” Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Tulsa King” season four and for what the new trailer reveals.
The September teaser was mostly mood. This trailer has a plot.”
It opens on a long table of old men in suits, the kind of sit-down the show has always loved. “Things happen,” Dwight says. “They change the course of a man’s life.” A few cuts later someone across the table sets the tone for the year: “If I find out whose fault this is, bad things are gonna happen to bad people.” That line is the season’s engine. Something has gone badly wrong for the crew, and the trailer is careful not to say what.
The political thread comes next. A state capitol dome sits against the sunrise, and then Gretchen Mol pushes through a scrum of reporters. Mol joins this season as a series regular, playing a Tulsa politician named Amanda Clark. A reporter shouts, “Has the mob come to Oklahoma?” Her answer is the trailer’s best line: “It may have come, but it sure as hell ain’t staying.” Mol spent five seasons on “Boardwalk Empire”, the HBO series created by Terence Winter, who is back running “Tulsa King” this year. It is hard not to see the two facts as connected.
Season three explains why the politics matter. It ended with the whiskey war won and with Cal Thresher (Neal McDonough) installed as Oklahoma’s new governor. Jeremiah Dunmire (Robert Patrick), the season’s villain, got away after kidnapping Dwight’s sister Joanne. So Dwight starts season four with an enemy in the governor’s mansion and another one still loose. A Tulsa politician promising to run the mob out of the state lands on top of both. The capitol shot at sunrise is not scenery. It is the season’s main battlefield.
Clark is not the only pressure. Dwight fires a pistol from a car at night. A police cruiser rolls up with lights flashing. Officers raid one of his businesses shouting “Police! Search warrant!” An older man in a suit tells Dwight, “Sounds like somebody at the top has a serious hard-on for you.” Put together, the trailer reads like a coordinated push to shut Dwight down, from the statehouse to the street. That is a different threat from the rival gangsters of earlier seasons. It is harder to shoot your way out of.
Then comes the loss, and the trailer cuts from a shower of sparks to the Bred and Buck saloon, and Dwight sits at a bar and says, “Everything I own is gone. I need a drink.” Martin Starr’s Lawrence, the crew’s tech man, answers from across the room: “Well said.” Paramount+’s own logline for the season promises Dwight a “crushing personal loss”, and this looks like at least part of it. Whether the loss is only property is the question the trailer leaves open.
Money is the other problem. A voice on a phone call reminds him, “Dwight Manfredi, you still owe me.” His sister Joanne (Annabella Sciorra) tells him flatly, “We’re running on fumes.” Dwight’s answer is the same one he gave in the teaser, “I’m not ready to fold”, followed by a new promise: “I’m gonna get it all back.” The trailer shows how. There is a horse race at a dirt track. There is a casino table and a stack of chips. And there is Dwight in an office telling a couple in cowboy hats to “go out and be creative.”
The new rival arrives in the back half. A character introduces him as “Liquid Rick”, a man who is “a huge music producer” and “also a criminal.” The trailer gives him a recording studio, a red-lit nightclub and a balcony full of people. He gets the closing threat: “I’m not just coming to Tulsa, baby. I’m coming to take it over.” Paramount+ has not said who plays him. He is the most modern villain the show has had, and he points the season toward the city’s music and nightlife money rather than its oil.
The cast is the biggest the show has carried. Martin Starr and Jay Will and Vincent Piazza are back from the crew along with Annabella Sciorra, Chris Caldovino and McKenna Quigley Harrington. Frank Grillo, James Russo, Kevin Pollak and McDonough are back as well. Garrett Hedlund and Dana Delany are billed again, and Mol is the headline addition. Whiskey Riff reports that Pat McAfee, the former NFL punter turned broadcaster, makes a cameo in the trailer. That is a small thing, but it fits a show that has always enjoyed its stunt casting.
It helps to remember how far Dwight has come. The show began in November 2022 with a New York capo walking out of prison after 25 years and being exiled to Tulsa by his own family, a place he had never seen. It was Stallone’s first lead role in a scripted television series. Four seasons later Dwight owns a saloon and a dispensary and a whiskey business, and the joke of the early episodes has turned into a real empire. That is exactly what makes the new trailer’s threat land. He finally has something to lose.
Winter’s return is the real story behind the scenes. He developed “Tulsa King” from Taylor Sheridan’s original idea and ran season one. Dave Erickson, who came over from Sheridan’s “Mayor of Kingstown”, ran season three and has since left. Season four is the third change of showrunner on a series that is only four seasons old. The trailer looks like Winter’s work. It is darker and more organized with fewer jokes and more consequences.
There is also the question of where the show goes after this. Season three ended its whiskey war by quietly passing a torch to Samuel L. Jackson, whose character is getting his own spinoff. That makes season four the first time “Tulsa King” has had to stand next to its own offshoot. A season about Dwight losing everything and clawing it back is a smart way to remind the audience why the original is worth watching.
The last word goes to Stallone. A man in a bar tells him, “We built something here.” Dwight looks back at him and answers, “It’s not going anywhere.” It is a good closing line, and it doubles as the show’s own pitch. Four seasons in, with a new showrunner, a new enemy and a political fight on its hands, “Tulsa King” is betting that its audience is not going anywhere either. October 16th will tell.
What Do You Think? Who is behind the push to drive Dwight out of Oklahoma, Amanda Clark or someone above her? Is Liquid Rick a real threat or a distraction from the bigger fight? And does Terence Winter’s return make you more excited for season four?
Catch up properly: every Taylor Sheridan series in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Sheridan-verse timeline.
See you on the next binge!
