Sylvester Stallone spends most of the new “Tulsa King” teaser saying variations of one thing, and it is hard not to read it as the show talking about itself. “I’m not ready to fold,” Dwight Manfredi growls at the 48 second mark. Then, nine seconds later: “You can’t get rid of me.” Paramount+ put the 65 second teaser up on 1 September along with a premiere date, and the date is the first piece of news: Season 4 arrives Friday, 16 October.
That date is worth pausing on, because it moved. Listings had Season 4 landing in late September, and it has been pushed roughly a month. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “Tulsa King” Season 4 teaser, including what the footage shows about Dwight’s new enemies and where the season appears to be shot. The second piece of news is the bigger one for anyone who has watched this show wobble: Terence Winter is back.
Sylvester Stallone spends most of the new “Tulsa King” teaser saying variations of one thing, and it is hard not to read it as the show talking about itself.”
Winter created “Tulsa King” from Taylor Sheridan’s original idea and ran its first season, then left, then came back, and is now returning again as head writer and executive producer. He replaces Dave Erickson, who ran Season 3 and came over from Sheridan’s “Mayor of Kingstown,” and who is reported to have exited after clashing with Stallone over where the show should go. That is at least the third showrunner handoff on a series that is only four seasons old, and it is the thing to keep an eye on rather than the teaser.
Because here is the honest read on the footage: it is a teaser, and it behaves like one. Sixty five seconds, almost no plot, a lot of Stallone lit from one side looking tired and dangerous. It opens on Dwight in a car in the dark asking “The hell is that?” and it gets to its thesis fast. “It’s a dirty business,” someone says at eleven seconds. “And everyone gets a little stained,” Dwight answers at sixteen.
What the cutting actually tells you is where the money and the trouble are coming from this year. There is a hand sliding a brick of cash across green felt and a briefcase of bills, so the casino thread is alive. There is a state capitol dome at sunrise, and then a woman in a blazer pushing through a scrum of reporters and microphones, which is the season’s political lane arriving in one shot. There is a car burning down to the frame with the interior fully engulfed, twice, in consecutive cuts. And there is a man standing alone in a modern A-frame church staring up at a crucifix, which in this show is never a good sign for whoever is standing there.
The woman in the press scrum is Gretchen Mol, and she is the season’s most interesting piece of casting. She joins as a series regular playing Amanda Clark, a Tulsa politician, which lines up exactly with Paramount+’s own logline for the year: Dwight fighting to legitimise his empire and protect his crew while corrupt politicians, new enemies and a crushing personal loss come at him from every direction. Mol spent five seasons on “Boardwalk Empire,” which Winter created. Her arriving in the same year he comes back is a detail worth noticing, even if nobody has said the two are connected.
Neal McDonough is back as Cal Thresher, and he gets one of the teaser’s better frames, sat in a suit in a very nice room looking like a man who has already decided how this ends. The returning bench around Stallone is deep: Martin Starr, Jay Will, Garrett Hedlund, Dana Delany and Annabella Sciorra are all listed for the season. That is a lot of continuity for a show changing hands again at the top.
One thing in the footage does not obviously fit Oklahoma, and we are going to describe it rather than explain it. Around the twenty second mark the teaser cuts to a large stone estate with a colonnaded front, black SUVs parked along the gravel, and then to a van whose plate is not a US format. It reads as European, and the architecture reads as old money a long way from Tulsa. No announcement mentions the season leaving the country, and the official synopsis is entirely Tulsa-facing, so we are not going to tell you Dwight goes to Italy. We are telling you those frames are in the teaser and nobody has explained them.
The rest is texture, and it is the texture this show does well. A group crowded around a table in a brick-arched cellar. Boots and neon outside a bar. Two men going at each other on a lawn while a woman in a cowboy hat watches from the porch. A limousine pulling up to a lit modern building at night. A car swerving through a strip mall while a man in green sprints across the frame. An older man with an earring and a gun who is very clearly not one of Dwight’s. It is a sizzle reel, not a story, and it is not pretending otherwise.
What makes this a story rather than a date announcement is the showrunner churn sitting under it. “Tulsa King” has been one of Paramount+’s most reliable performers since 2022, and it has also never settled on a voice. Winter’s first season was a comedy about a New York gangster stranded in Oklahoma. What followed leaned harder into crime drama. Erickson’s season went somewhere else again. Bringing back the man who set the original tone is the clearest signal Paramount+ has sent about what it thinks went wrong, and it is a bet that the fix is to go back rather than forward.
The counter-argument is that a show on its third or fourth creative lead in four years usually has a problem no single hire solves, and that a “crushing personal loss” in the logline reads like a series reaching for stakes it has not earned organically. We have watched enough of these to be wary. But Stallone at 80 doing this character is still a genuinely strange and watchable thing, and Winter is the only writer who has made the comedy and the menace sit in the same scene without one killing the other.
What Do You Think? Is Terence Winter returning for a third stint the fix “Tulsa King” needs, or a sign the show cannot hold a creative vision long enough to matter? Does bringing in a Tulsa politician as a series regular finally give Dwight an enemy he cannot punch his way past? And what do you make of those European-looking frames nobody has explained, in a season whose official synopsis never leaves Oklahoma?
Catch up properly: every Taylor Sheridan show in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Sheridan-verse timeline.
See you on the next binge!
