Just when he thought he was out, they pulled him back in.
Emmy-winning writer Terence Winter is returning to Tulsa King.
The Sopranos veteran is back on board the Paramount+ drama after being the showrunner of its 2022 debut season. The series follows a former mobster, played by Sylvester Stallone, who forms a new crime empire in Oklahoma.
Winter and Tulsa King‘s creator and executive producer Taylor Sheridan famously conflicted about the creative direction of the series. After Winter stepped away, the big question became who was going to take over his gig, given Sheridan’s self-professed preference for remaining hands-on with his shows. Stallone, likewise, has firm opinions about the writing in his projects — having written and co-written the screenplays for many of his hit films over the years — and claims some of the show’s dialogue was his own creation.
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But Tulsa King now has a writers room that’s back up and running with Winter onboard. Yet this time, Winter won’t be the showrunner. The series won’t have a traditional showrunner and is instead bringing on an as-yet-unnamed executive producer and director to help steer the ship’s production side.
Sources say Winter’s new position (he’s also an executive producer, same as season one) allows him to just focus on the show’s writing amid his busy schedule and work closely with Stallone, with whom he has a strong relationship. (It also isolates him a bit more from Sheridan compared to serving as showrunner.) “He loves these characters and loved working with Sly and was glad his post-strike schedule allowed him to return to write but not run the show,” explained one source close to the production.
Bringing back Winter certainly makes sense: The first season of Tulsa King was a ratings hit — the second-most-watched Paramount+ series after Sheridan’s Yellowstone prequel 1923. (Yellowstone itself airs on Paramount Network, not Paramount+.) The show has been successful enough for CBS to pick up its first season to run on broadcast this summer. Season two is expected to debut on Paramount+ this fall.
Winter actually has a number of other projects on deck as well, including co-writing and executive producing the feature Midge for Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way banner, and writing and producing the adaptation of the Casey Sherman novel A Murder in Hollywood. He also has a sleeper hit that’s currently in theaters as a co-writer of Bob Marley: One Love for Paramount.
When Sheridan was asked last year why his showrunners for Tulsa King and Special-Ops: Lioness didn’t work out, he told The Hollywood Reporter: “My stories have a very simple plot that is driven by the characters as opposed to characters driven by a plot — the antithesis of the way television is normally modeled. I’m really interested in the dirty of the relationships in literally every scene. But when you hire a room that may not be motivated by those same qualities — and a writer always wants to take ownership of something they’re writing — and I give this directive and they’re not feeling it, then they’re going to come up with their own qualities. So for me, writers rooms, they haven’t worked.”
Tulsa King “follows New York mafia capo Dwight ‘The General’ Manfredi (Stallone), just after he is released from prison after 25 years and unceremoniously exiled by his boss to set up shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Realizing that his mob family may not have his best interests in mind, Dwight slowly builds a crew from a group of unlikely characters to help him establish a new criminal empire in a place that to him might as well be another planet.”
The first season of the series also stars Andrea Savage (I’m Sorry), Martin Starr (Silicon Valley), Max Casella (The Tender Bar), Domenick Lombardozzi (The Irishman), Vincent Piazza (Boardwalk Empire), Jay Will (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) and A.C. Peterson (Superman & Lois), with Garrett Hedlund (The United States vs. Billie Holiday) and Dana Delany (Body of Proof).
