Terence Winter Returns to ‘Tulsa King’ Writers’ Room for Season 2 After Exiting as Showrunner
Terence Winter’s riff with Taylor Sheridan has apparently been mended.
The Emmy-winning “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Sopranos” veteran is returning to Sheridan’s “Tulsa King” series after parting ways with production after its first season. Winter served as the original showrunner on the Paramount+ series, but tensions with creator and executive producer Sheridan led to Winter exiting.
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“Tulsa King” stars Sylvester Stallone as a crime boss setting up a new empire in Oklahoma. An Oscar-nominated screenwriter himself, Stallone claimed he penned some of the “Tulsa King” dialogue as the series did not have a writers’ room.
Now, Winter is confirmed to be among the writers for Season 2 of the show, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter.
A source told the outlet that Winter will solely write for the series alongside Stallone, while an unnamed executive producer and director will jointly guide the creative vision for the series. There will be no showrunner for “Tulsa King.”
In addition to his return to “Tulsa King,” Winter is writing and producing an adaptation of “A Murder in Hollywood” and is set to co-write and executive produce “Midge” for Leonardo DiCaprio’s production banner Appian Way. Winter also co-wrote the Paramount biopic “Bob Marley: One Love.”
Winter previously told IndieWire that collaborating with Stallone on “Tulsa King” was a career highlight.
“Look, with Sly, you’re getting an Academy Award nominated writer, a director, a producer, and an editor who also happens to be a great actor,” Winter said. “You’d be foolish not to bring him into the process. It was really easy. It was a real collaboration. It’s great when they’re good at it — when you’re with actors who can [write] well. It was really refreshing to work with somebody who just cares about the material.”
Stallone said of Winter in turn, “I tried to make it as close to my personality as possible. The idea is: They come up with an idea, a concept, but if you’re a writer, you know how to tailor things to your strengths and deflect your weaknesses. […] Terry [Winter] had that confidence in me.”
“Tulsa King” creator Sheridan previously told The Hollywood Reporter that he is not a fan of writers’ rooms as whole. Both “Tulsa King” and Sheridan’s other series “Lioness” had showrunners exit before the series aired.
“The freedom of the artist to create must be unfettered,” Sheridan said in 2023. “If they tell me, ‘You’re going to have to write a check for $540,000 to four people to sit in a room that you never have to meet,’ then that’s between the studio and the guild. But if I have to check in creatively with others for a story I’ve wholly built in my brain, that would probably be the end of me telling TV stories.”
Sheridan continued, “[I thought] I would write, cast and direct the pilots, and then we would bring in someone as a showrunner to run a writers room and I could check in and guide them. That plan failed. There were some things that none of us foresaw. 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,” the “Wind River” writer said. “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.”
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