Last year I got really into the HBO show Chillin' Island. I wrote about it as part of what I saw as a group of shows that I dubbed “Meditative TV,” but there was another reason I loved the exploits of Dap, Despot, and Lakutis going to some seemingly random location and inviting a rapper to do something like ride a four-wheeler in the mud or hang out in the desert. It’s a weird show, but it’s also got the old New Yorker fish out of water feel to it. The trio of hosts removes themselves from their normal urban surroundings to do whatever thing it is they do in each episode, and something about that always appeals to me. It’s almost certainly why I’m obsessed with the latest Taylor Sheridan vehicle that seems lab created to appeal to boomer parents of all shapes and political views, Tulsa King.
First off, I’ve never watched Yellowstone and it’s likely I won’t. It just doesn’t seem like my thing. But Tulsa King stars Sly Stallone as Dwight, a mob capo fresh out of prison who is basically sent to mafia Siberia, Tulsa, Oklahoma, as a welcome home gift for not ratting out his crew. He’s in his 70s and has been locked up for 25 years, so there’s the whole subplot that he hasn’t talked to his daughter since he was sent away, but he also can’t quite understand how the culture has changed. In one scene, Dwight, who is high after discovering the magic of weed being legal, starts talking about how he can’t get over that General Motors has electric cars, “Dylan’s gone public” and how much coffee costs. That turns into a stoned rant that literally starts off with him asking about what’s going on with this country and ranting about the younger generation, “and these pronouns. What the fuck is with the pronouns? He, she, him, they, the, boom, bang, fa, foo.” Then he says what his pronoun is: “‘It.’ As in I can’t take this anymore.” I can’t tell if it’s meant to be serious or comedy or something in the middle but it’s one of the more hilarious old guy rants I’ve seen on television in quite some time. People who feel the way Dwight feels will say “Hell yeah,” and everybody else will roll their eyes and say “OK, boomer.”
Thankfully, Dwight isn’t stoned that often. He doesn’t weigh in on that many hot-button topics. Instead, he’s more inclined to kvetching about things like how his local coffee shop serves espresso in paper and not a glass demitasse. No problem. He just buys his own little demitasse and pours his espresso into it. He wants to drink it like they do in New York City, the right way to drink it.
Dwight and the espresso is one of the many little hilarious parts laced throughout the show that makes me appreciate it as more than just another mob show, more than just another Taylor Sheridan attempt at making a show that just about any demographic would watch. Tulsa King is the latest addition to the New Yorker out of their element canon. The fast-talking, tough, usually Italian, Jewish, Black, Hispanic, or gay person that offends the nice folks of whatever flyover state they end up in, but ultimately wins them over or triumphs in the end. Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Leguizamo as drag queens in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, Billy Crystal and his friends learning to rough it out west in City Slickers, Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei driving from Brooklyn to Alabama to save the day in My Cousin Vinny, the shockingly unstreamable show Northern Exposure, and my personal favorite, Steve Martin in what could only be described as marinara face—a portrayal of an Italian-American that is so wildly bad that it’s hilarious but you might have to ask an Italian friend if they’re offended—in My Blue Heaven.
The New Yorker out of their element is almost always my favorite setup and something that doesn’t really work as well if, say, you get a guy from Boston and drop him in the deep South or you take The Bear and move them to some other city that’s not Chicago to do an Italian beef popup. 1995’s Houseguest, starring Sinbad as a guy from Pittsburgh who lies his way into the hearts of Phil Hartman and his fellow suburbanites is fun, and that’s a version of this particular strain of entertainment, but I had to look at the movie’s synopsis to remember where Sinbad’s character was from and where he went to. The thing that I weirdly don’t remember anybody bringing up in Houseguest is that Sinbad is one of the only Black people you see in the town Hartman lives in. The film this real Clinton-era racism is dead, yay sort of thing that would probably have you wondering if the movie is going to go into Get Out territory if you’re only seeing it for the first time in 2023. Everybody just seems to like him right away and accepts he’s a dentist and not a guy from the city who is hiding out because he owes loan sharks $50,000. The 1990s were a glorious decade for this sort of premise, that the prostitute (Milk Money, 1994) or the pompous doctor (Doc Hollywood, 1991) could just show up in some small town or suburb and everybody likes and accepts them. But the New Yorker has to win people over. They have to explain why they pronounce things a certain way and they look at the food they’re served with disgust. That, and they almost always have some sort of scheme.
Dwight in Tulsa King is all about schemes. Tulsa isn’t exactly some small backwater town. It isn’t the biggest city in Oklahoma, either; it has over 400,000 residents and some really impressive buildings. But Dwight is from New York City (baby). He’s street-smart. He knows how to make money. He knows how to talk nice or act tough depending on the situation. He also loves to complain and he has an accent. Sylvester Stallone, a guy who found fame playing a boxer from Philadelphia but doesn’t talk like he’s from there, gets to put that Hell’s Kitchen-bred accent to good use once again. He doesn’t have a college education, he’s maybe not smarter than every single person he comes in contact with in Oklahoma, yet everything he does works because he plays outside of the rules.
In the end, Tulsa King isn’t good, but it’s fun. I can’t tell what sort of show it’s supposed to be and I don’t know if the people behind it do, either. They get the recipe right by using a famous movie star like Stallone, which adds to the spectacle feel of what could otherwise be a very bad show. The show relies on corny dialogue and there isn’t a lot of action, but it also adds something just slightly different to the New Yorker fish out of water tale. Its closest relation is My Blue Heaven, which also saw a mobster from out east taking advantage of a bunch of simple and sweet rubes, but that movie was pure comedy. Not a “gritty comedy” or anything like that; it was Steve Martin, Rick Moranis and Joan Cusack in a film written by Nora Ephron based loosely on her husband Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy. If you’re familiar with the name of that book, it’s because a month after My Blue Heaven was out, the Wiseguy was turned into another film: Goodfellas. And although Martin Scorsese’s mob films don’t often get lumped under the “Comedy” section, anybody who has watched his movies enough knows that Marty’s got a good sense of humor. He’s a funny guy. Like a clown? No. I wouldn’t dare say that. But besides Pesci being Pesci, the movie ends on a perfect note that I think both Willy Shakespeare and Franz Kafka would get a good chuckle out of. We see Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill in a robe getting his newspaper. The voiceover is him talking about how his fate is worse than death: “Right after I got here I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles and ketchup. I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.” His hell: some suburban development far away from New York City.