We recommend "Tulsa King" season 3, with a very good Sylvester Stallone as a mafia boss.

Who would have thought that good old Sylvester Stallone, 79 years old, would have taken such pleasure in putting in hours of filming while his knees are killing him to be able to be the headliner of a series in which he plays a mob boss? Yet this is the case with Tulsa King , a brilliant new idea from Taylor Sheridan, Paramount's golden showrunner who already has Lioness, Landman, 1883, Mayor of Kingstown and Yellowstone.

Tulsa King returns with a third season in which "Sly" reprises his role as Dwight Manfredi, known as the General, a New York mafia boss who has just spent 25 years in the closet without ever betraying his family. The new bosses of his mafia family, believing that the kind Dwight is slightly burnt out and nearing the end of his life, decide to send him to Tulsa, a remote Midwestern town that no one visits during school holidays. His goal? To establish a local branch of the family to do business there.

Outdated suits and XXL bracelets

Dwight, like a good soldier, takes his outdated mafia suits, his white pointed-toe pumps, his 3-kilo bracelet, and his big hands to Oklahoma. Where we might have expected a series of pure violence with a former mafia member who comes to teach rednecks about life, Taylor Sheridan takes the opposite approach and plays on irony. Sylvester Stallone is old, outdated, from another era, and he plays it off. Better still, rather than looking down on all the inhabitants of Tulsa, he builds a new, motley family (a young right-hand man who thinks he's a thug, a country singer who becomes a car manager, the owner of the local CBD store who becomes his partner, a ranch owner with whom he falls head over heels, etc.). This little gang, which will grow over the first two seasons, is Dwight's new family, who, as a result, becomes Dwight's protective father.

With its well-found supporting roles, notably among Manfredi's enemies (Vincent Piazza, Frank Grillo, Neal McDonough, Domenick Lombardozzi), the series takes us by the hand and takes us to this lost corner of America where thugs, natives, mafiosi and cowboys mix. This permanent shift, sprinkled with dark humor and good score settling allows the series to find its rhythm behind a Stallone who has never seemed to be having so much fun on a set. The former king of action cinema of the 80s-90s ( Rambo, Rocky, Demolition Man, Tango and Cash... ) assumes his age and uses it to his advantage, making the actor almost touching. Rarely seen in a mafioso role, especially with such second degree, "Sly" could have taken his check and done the minimum, but he does the opposite, almost giving a new lease of life to his immense career.

Samuel L. Jackson and New Orleans

The pleasure is such that it's contagious since another big "CV" will be showing up in this third season, and not just anyone: Samuel L. Jackson. This arrival is not insignificant since Quentin Tarantino's favorite actor is scheduled to play the lead role in another Taylor Sheridan project, a series derived from Tulsa King : NOLA King . Jackson will play Russell Lee Washington Jr. who, after befriending Dwight Manfredi during a ten-year sentence in federal prison, is sent to Tulsa by the New York Renzetti crime family to eliminate Dwight once and for all.

Inspired by what Dwight built in Tulsa and seduced by the promise of a second chance, Washington returns to New Orleans, his hometown that he abandoned forty years earlier, to reconnect with his loved ones and regain control of the city he left behind. We quickly imagine the two former veterans uniting to fight against New York. In any case, this third season of Tulsa King is promising since the second ended with Dwight's arrest by the FBI and the possible opening of a collaboration with law enforcement...

This Sunday on Paramount+.