The latest groundbreaking production by the Mafia-Industrial Complex is Tulsa King, a mob series starring Sylvester Stallone.  I’ll describe it as Rip van Winkle meets The Sopranos and My Cousin Vinny.  Intriguing?

Beside the clever combination, Tulsa King has blazed a new trail as a Sunday primetime CBS series.  Unlike The Sopranos which confined itself to adult-rated HBO, Tulsa King premiered last year as a cable series (Paramount+) but was so tame in language and violence that it captured the hearts of CBS executives.  So, CBS is rebroadcasting the series one season behind Paramount+.

The plot line is novel:  Mob capo Dwight Manfredi has just completed a 25-year prison sentence and dispatched by his don to Tulsa, Oklahoma to expand the “family’s” operations.  The world has changed in 25 years and Manfredi is confounded by apps, cashless transactions, legalized pot, and the latest jargon.  On top of this, he arrives penniless in cowboy country and needs to extort the yokels at warp speed to pay his room and board.  (Add Robinson Crusoe to Manfredi’s character traits.)

This combination of plot and character is not without its attractions.  I may negatively judge the ethnic stereotyping but I’ll keep watching the series out of curiosity.  Just like My Cousin Vinny, the cultural clash shtick touches some dormant inner pride.  Stallone pioneered the technique with his Rocky saga – Italian American street thug become an all-American champ.  Would Tulsa King work without Italian stereotypes?  Be serious!  Manfredi’s ties to New York are a subplot that insures the series screams ITALIAN.  The dialog contains some capisces, and stunads, as well as made men who are out to undermine Manfredi. Even the feds are monitoring his every move.  It’s three-dimensional chess as Manfredi establishes his fiefdom.

If the western setting is meant to appeal to non-ethnics, Manfredi’s first sidekick Tyson is the token Black.  Tyson becomes Manfredi’s driver and guide to the dismay of his hardworking family in the plumbing business.  (Wasn’t John Gotti in the plumbing business?)  Adding to the racial diversity, Native Americans are part of the Tulsa scene.  In the course of extorting a legalized pot vendor, Manfredi finds himself negotiating prices with grower/wholesaler Bad Face, a tribal sub-chief.

We don’t associate Stallone with the mob genre.  Rocky rose above it, and Rambo was lightyears away.  Yet, a recent interview with Stallone revealed that playing a goombah was a lifelong dream.  In 1972, he was turned down as an extra in The Godfather, which he hoped would make his bones into a Mafia movie career.  The closest he came was his 1976 Rocky character as a mob debt collector.  Maybe he didn’t have the bulk and face of a movie goombah.  He is only half Italian.

Imagine if he embarked on a Mafia movie career with his mother’s maiden name, Labofish?  A strange name indeed, possibly German or Ukrainian Jewish or even Celtic French.  It’s easy to see why Stallone gravitated to his father’s side, an immigrant from the Puglia region.  But he didn’t quite master Italian surnames as evidenced by Rocky’s last name Balboa.  Perhaps Stallone thought the Spanish explorer who first sighted the Pacific Ocean was Italian, like so many others.  The surname Balbo would have been more appropriate.

So, Stallone always wanted to be a movie mobster but with a spin.  In Tulsa, Dwight Manfredi is a learned man who spent 25 years in the prison library devouring such tomes as The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Plato and Machiavelli.  Will we soon witness him reciting The Canterbury Tales in Middle English?

Hollywood has reinvented the Italic gangster into many forms to keep up with the times.  I liken this progression to Mr. Potato Head – change his ears, plug in a pipe, add a smile, and so on.  The technique began with the ‘goombah in therapy’ gimmick that was launched in 1999 with HBO’s The Sopranos and the movies Analyse This and Analyse That.  Goombahs now come in all flavors: scary, flawed, or funny.  With each tweak comes a ‘nuanced’ character that ‘defies’ the stereotype and is theoretically not insulting to Italian Americans.  Stallone now gives us his erudite-goombah-among-the-cowpokes Potato Head.

Sort of a Labofish out of water. -JLM