Paramount+’s hit Sylvester Stallone drama Tulsa King is finally back for season three and a new addition to the cast has everyone excited
Tulsa King fans are ecstatic as another action movie legend has joined the cast as a powerful new enemy for crime boss Dwight ‘The General’ Manfredi (played by Sylvester Stallone).
Season three premiered last Sunday night (21st September), taking fans back to the night Dwight was kidnapped by Special Agent Musso (Kevin Pollak).
Thankfully, he’s soon released, albeit as Musso’s new informant on an unknown target, and reunites with Margaret (Dana Delany), apologising for her ranch being ransacked by gunmen the night before.
After a quick visit to his family in Little Italy, Dwight discovers Cleo Montague’s (Bella Heathcote) family distillery is due to be sold to the powerful Dunmire family after her father Theodore (Brett Rice) made a handshake deal.
However, Dwight sees the distillery as a valuable asset to his own empire and promises a better deal for the Montagues.
Fans are saying season three is already an improvement over the previous outing(Image: PARAMOUNT)
Cue the introduction of Tulsa King season three’s terrifying new villain, Jeremiah Dunmire, portrayed by none other than Hollywood star Robert Patrick.
Patrick is best known for portraying the unstoppable T-1000 in James Cameron’s hit action movie sequel Terminator 2: Judgement Day and has more recently landed roles in Yellowstone prequel 1923 and HBO’s Peacemaker.
Jeremiah is naturally furious to discover Theo has reneged on their deal, and sets a group of thugs on his mansion who beat him to a pulp and burn his home to the ground.
Viewers were on the edge of their seats during this nail-biting premiere, which raises the stakes for Dwight and his crew to a whole new level. Fans were also already impressed with Patrick’s performance as this season’s sadistic antagonist.
Dwight’s newest rival Jeremiah Dunmire isn’t playing games(Image: PARAMOUNT)
One ecstatic viewer took to X to reply to Patrick’s recent post in which he warned Dwight not to “cross” him.
Using plenty of fire emojis they exclaimed in the comments: “Yoooo, I just watched the new episode and O M G… and this is just the 1st episode and yall WENT TF OFFF… WOW!! ..
“You ARE GONNA BE A PROBLEMA FOR Dwight. Your character already starting off EVIL AF. Dude, I WAS YELLING AT THE TV AT THE END LIKE NOOO WAY! 10/10 show!!
“I can’t wait for next week.. man oh man.. GANGSTA A*** S***!! Awesome job yall!!!”
Someone else replied: “you’re awesome dude, great career, enjoy your success!!”
Robert Patrick is best known for playing the deadly T-1000 in Terminator 2(Image: TRI-STAR PICTURES)
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Discussion continued over on Reddit, where one user wrote: “Good to see Robert Patrick get consistent acting work.” To which another viewer replied: “He killed it and he was only on screen for a few mins.”
Another said: “Robert Patrick Is [a] great bad guy character.”
While other fans praised the episode in general for starting off the new season strong, with one sharing: “It’s already looking great, way better than season 2’s premiere for sure.”
And a final fan predicted: “Sly’s gonna rip Terminator’s nuts off for killing that old guy!”
Are you excited to see Stallone going head-to-head with one of Hollywood’s greatest villains?
Tulsa King season 3 continues Sundays on Paramount+.
Sterlin Harjo perfected the “art of the hang” with the co-creation of his first television series, “Reservation Dogs.” The FX drama followed a group of Indigenous teens living on a fictional Oklahoma reservation, turning their everyday routine into high art — and is one of the best television shows of the 2020s.
Now, Harjo, 45, is tackling another type of genre: crime. His forthcoming series “The Lowdown,” premiering Sept. 23 with two episodes on FX, follows self-proclaimed “truthstorian” Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) on a mission to unearth buried truths about Tulsa’s problematic history while exposing present-day corruption. He’s a disheveled figure who drives around town in a tattered van and lives above the rare bookstore that he also happens to own. But when his latest exposé for a local publication calls into question a prominent Tulsa family, his investigation takes him on a dangerous road from the city’s seedy underbelly to its highest corridors of power.
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“‘Rez Dogs’ was my love letter to rural Oklahoma and where I grew up. ‘The Lowdown’ is my love letter to Tulsa, where I currently live,” says Harjo, who produces, writes and directs on the new series. “You see the beauty and the darkness. You see everything.”
The eight-episode drama, best described as Tulsa noir, also stars Oklahoma expats Tim Blake Nelson, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Tracy Letts as well as Keith David. Appearances by “Rez Dog” alumni include Kaniehtiio Horn (a.k.a. the Deer Lady).
Harjo, who is a citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and is of Muscogee descent, spoke with The Times about his love for Oklahoma, the challenges of following a celebrated show like “Reservation Dogs” and how “The Lowdown” is loosely based on his own experience working with a guerrilla journalist.
“Rez Dogs” was such an exceptional series that garnered critical acclaim across all four seasons. With “The Lowdown,” was it hard to not compete with that previous success?
I didn’t think about it. My experience in this industry has been people telling me that whatever the thing is that I want to make can’t be made, and me thinking, I’m going to make it anyway, then forging ahead. Then it finds an audience, and people enjoy it. I had pitched “Rez Dogs” a few different times, and it was always soft pitches because I was nervous of being laughed out of the room. No one was interested. But having the confidence of my friend [“Rez Dogs” co-creator and writer] Taika Waititi and FX … they were open to the way that we told the story. I think they were kind of blown away. So they made it. They never said no. But I’ve had many ‘no’s and many eye rolls.
Ethan Hawke stars in “The Lowdown” as Lee Raybon, a self-proclaimed “truthstorian” and owner of a rare bookshop. He’s based on Tulsa journalist Lee Roy Chapman.
(Shane Brown / FX)
Hawke plays Lee Raybon in “The Lowdown,” a figure who is obsessed with getting to the bottom of things, to the point where he neglects many other aspects of his life. What inspired the creation of that character?
The story is fictional, but the character was inspired by someone I worked with named Lee Roy Chapman at This Land Press magazine. He was very much a soldier for truth and I would ride shotgun and make these videos about the underground, unknown histories of Tulsa. The series was called “Tulsa Public Secrets.” We were this startup, full of piss and vinegar, trying to tell the truth and write about our community and make documentaries about our community. It was about a pent-up need for truth in this city. That push to tell the truth and find truth and tell our story and create a narrative around us. It gave us and the city an identity, something to hold on to.
“The Lowdown” unfolds at a really brisk pace, yet it also has the kick-back vibe of “Rez Dogs.”
There’s the art of the hang, where the genre is people hanging out. Look at “Rez Dogs” or “Dazed and Confused.” There’s an art to hanging and being with characters, and it feels OK to just sit there with them. I think “The Lowdown” has a good balance of that, where you could just hang with [Raybon] on his block. But there’s also this unfolding story so things never get boring.
Did the making of “The Lowdown” and “Rez Dogs” overlap?
No, but it was toward the end of “Rez Dogs” that I dusted a script off that was like 10 years old. It was a feature [film], but I thought I would love to do a crime show, so I just made it into an hourlong pilot, and it became “The Lowdown.”
Sterlin Harjo says his new series was originally a script for a feature film: “I thought I would love to do a crime show, so I just made it into an hour-long pilot, and it became ‘The Lowdown.’”
(Guerin Blask / For The Times)
Ethan Hawke starred in the last season of “Rez Dogs.” Is that how you two connected?
I had a mutual friend who introduced us because Ethan had written a graphic novel about the Apache Wars and Geronimo. It was originally a script that he couldn’t get made in Hollywood because it was told from the Native side of things. Out of frustration, he made it into a graphic novel. I read it and was interested in adapting it for a show. I met up with Ethan, and I pitched my idea of the adaptation and he loved it. We spoke the same language. So we started writing together and our friendship came out of that. And then “Rez Dogs” came out, and he wrote me to say that he really loved it. He said, “If you ever have anything for me …” Of course I’ll write something [for him]! So he became Elora’s dad.
“The Lowdown” was shot on location in Tulsa and you used much of the same crew from “Rez Dogs.” But I also hear your own family was involved, as well as some “Rez Dogs” alums.
The crew and I know how to work together at this point. It’s like a big family. And my [actual] family was there. My brother was doing locations. My kids came on set. We’re shooting on some of my land. My dad was hired to brush-hog it. My mom’s an extra. There’s a couple of “Rez Dogs” cameos. You’ll see Willie Jack [Paulina Alexis] in the opening. Graham Greene’s in it. But I don’t know how much I’m supposed to say yet. I better not say …
You started out as an indie filmmaker. Can you talk a little about that journey to series TV?
I’ve always felt like an outsider. I’m a small-town Native kid from rural Oklahoma. I never felt like I had a foot in this industry. I was an independent filmmaker forever. I sometimes felt like everything was against me, like there’s no money, and I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so it felt like the industry at large didn’t care about the work I was doing.
Before “Rez Dogs,” I never worked in TV and I never worked for anyone else doing films. I only had the education I got with the Sundance Directors Lab, which is the most freedom any filmmaker is ever going to have. Then I was lucky enough to make films that were so low-budget. It meant the stakes weren’t high because no one saw them. So if they hated them, I wasn’t destroyed.
Your films and previous series were rooted in Indigenous viewpoints and experiences. Those cultures have been so misrepresented across all aspects of American entertainment. What gave you the confidence to keep pitching those stories?
I attribute that to not having anything to lose. “Rez Dogs” came at this time when I thought I was going to have to move on. I was at the end of my career road, where I was about to start a nonprofit or find the next chapter of what to do. I had been the freelance filmmaker for a long time and it just got hard to pay bills. With “Rez Dogs,” it was like, I could try to play it safe right now or I could swing for the fences. I had seen opportunities come and go, but I have this shot and this one at-bat. I need to just go for it. Luckily, FX is a place that allowed me to do that. And I did it. Luckily, I’d been making independent films for years and figured out my voice, so it wasn’t hard to ground “Rez Dogs” in my voice.
“With ‘Rez Dogs,’ it was like, I could try to play it safe right now or I could swing for the fences,” Sterlin Harjo says. “I had seen opportunities come and go, but I have this shot and this one at-bat.”
(Guerin Blask / For The Times)
Were there outside influences that also helped you get there?
“Atlanta” and “Louie.” Those cracked my mind open to what TV could be and allowed me in. Because to tell an Indigenous story about a community, I had to go to different places. If I was just focused on the kids [in “Rez Dogs”], it would be one thing and that’s it. I needed to expand. And so [it was] taking some of what “Atlanta” did but having this relay, like passing the baton off to different segments of the [Indigenous] community. I was also inspired by “The Wire.”
And “Rez Dogs” was a story that I always wanted to tell. Taika [who is of Maori descent] and I would end up talking about how similar they were from both of our homes, and if you could just kind of capture what it felt like to hear your aunts and uncles telling stories and lying and exaggerating and talking about mythology and superstitions. If you could capture all that, as Indigenous people, that’s what we wanted and craved.
The key to that was making it about this community, but it was a bit of a Trojan horse. It’s about these teenagers that are dealing with life and that’s a subject that everyone knows. So you start with that, and then expand out once you have people on your side.
The motto you mentioned— “Nothing to lose”—can you still use it now that you’ve had some success, and if so, why does it still work for you?
I think it has to do with people close to me dying when I was young. It’s a big community, a big family, and I was always at a funeral. I’ve been a pallbearer like 15 times or something. It gave me the sense that you can’t be afraid to put stuff out there. I’ve always had a way of diving off a cliff. It’s like, if everything fails after this, I’m OK with it. If everything dries up, that’s cool. At least I gave it a shot. This is going to sound hippie-dippie, but I think the energy that it takes to dive off a cliff and just go for it is an act in itself that creates energy. Something good will come out of it. So as long as you’re moving forward, something comes out of it.
If you’re a Gen Xer or younger, there’s a good chance you’ve contemplated moving out of California.
The reasons are obvious. It’s expensive and difficult to raise a family, pay rent or even consider buying a home.
That struggle isn’t just on the mind of locals. Midwestern and Southern states have recognized an opportunity and are making their best pitches to frustrated Californians.
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So, is there a price Tulsa, Okla., could offer you to move? Are the incentives of cheaper gas, much shorter commutes and overall drive times enough of an appeal? I haven’t even mentioned the cost of living and a real chance of buying a home.
Rollins felt socially isolated working a remote job in Ocean Beach for a tech company, but still overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people around her.
Months earlier she read about a program, Tulsa Remote, that would pay remote workers to relocate to Oklahoma’s second-largest city for at least a year. She decided to give it a shot and visit.
“When I was [in California], I was so consumed with the process of day-to-day living — the traffic, getting places, scheduling things,” Rollins said. “Here there’s so much more space to think creatively about your life and to kind of set it up the way you want.”
After five months in Tulsa, Rollins met her significant other at a trivia night. Her partner, with whom she now lives, made the journey from California to Tulsa for school during the pandemic.
“He grew up in Santa Cruz and was living 10 minutes from me down the road in Pacifica, but we never met in California,” she said. “We met in Tulsa.”
What is Tulsa offering?
Tulsa Remote — funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation — started in 2019, and has sought to recruit new residents to diversify the city’s workforce.
It decided to offer $10,000 to remote workers who would move to the state for at least a year.
The program also provides volunteer and socializing opportunities for new residents and grants them membership at a co-working space for 36 months.
What do the numbers say?
Tulsa Remote has attracted more than 3,600 remote workers since its inception.
More than 7,800 Californians have applied to the program and 539 have made the move, cementing California as the second-most popular origin state behind Texas.
Those numbers reflect something of a wider trend: From 2010 through 2023, about 9.2 million people moved from California to other states, while only 6.7 million people moved to California from other parts of the country, according to the American Community Survey.
A Public Policy Institute of California survey conducted in 2023 found that 34% of Californians have seriously considered leaving the state because of high housing costs.
Zach and Katie Meincke, former Westsiders
The lower cost of living was a huge bonus for the Meinckes when they moved three years ago.
They went from paying $2,400 in monthly rent on a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in L.A.’s Westside to a five-bedroom, three-bathroom house in Tulsa for just a few hundred dollars more.
It ended up being fortuitous timing for the couple, who discovered they were expecting their first child — a daughter named Ruth — just weeks after they decided to move.
The couple are expecting their second child in December.
It’s a life milestone that Meincke says may not have happened in Los Angeles. In California, it costs nearly $300,000 to raise a child to 18. In Oklahoma, researchers estimate it costs about $241,000, according to a LendingTree study this year.
“There was no way we were going to move into a house in Los Angeles unless we had roommates, and that’s not an ideal situation,” Zach Meincke said. “We were 37 when we left Los Angeles and it felt like we were at a point that if we wanted to have all those other things in life — children, a house — we need to make that shift.”
Get wrapped up in tantalizing stories about dating, relationships and marriage.
Have a great weekend, from the Essential California team
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WASHINGTON — President Trump honored Juneteenth in each of his first four years as president, even before it became a federal holiday. He even claimed once to have made it “famous.”
But on this year’s Juneteenth holiday on Thursday, the usually talkative president kept silent about a day important to Black Americans for marking the end of slavery in the country he leads again.
No words about it from his lips, on paper or through his social media site.
Asked whether Trump would commemorate Juneteenth in any way, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “I’m not tracking his signature on a proclamation today. I know this is a federal holiday. I want to thank all of you for showing up to work. We are certainly here. We’re working 24/7 right now.”
Asked in a follow-up question whether Trump might recognize the occasion another way or on another day, Leavitt said, “I just answered that question for you.”
Trump’s silence was a sharp contrast from his prior acknowledgment of the holiday. Juneteenth celebrates the end of slavery in the United States by commemorating June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas. Their freedom came more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln liberated slaves in the Confederacy by signing the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War.
Trump’s quiet on the issue also deviated from White House guidance that Trump planned to sign a Juneteenth proclamation. Leavitt didn’t explain the change. Trump held no public events Thursday, but he shared statements about Iran, the TikTok app and Fed chairman Jerome Powell on his social media site.
He had more to say about Juneteenth in yearly statements in his first term.
In 2017, Trump invoked the “soulful festivities and emotional rejoicing” that swept through the Galveston crowd when a major general delivered the news that all enslaved people were free.
He told the Galveston story in each of the next three years. “Together, we honor the unbreakable spirit and countless contributions of generations of African Americans to the story of American greatness,” he added in his 2018 statement.
In 2019: “Across our country, the contributions of African Americans continue to enrich every facet of American life.”
In 2020: “June reminds us of both the unimaginable injustice of slavery and the incomparable joy that must have attended emancipation. It is both a remembrance of a blight on our history and a celebration of our Nation’s unsurpassed ability to triumph over darkness.”
In 2020, after suspending his campaign rallies because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump chose Tulsa, Okla., as the place to resume his public gatherings, and scheduled a rally for June 19. But the decision met with such fierce criticism that Trump postponed the event by a day.
Black leaders had said it was offensive for Trump to choose June 19 and Tulsa for a campaign event, given the significance of Juneteenth and Tulsa being the place where, in 1921, a white mob looted and burned that city’s Greenwood district, an economically thriving area referred to as Black Wall Street. As many as 300 Black Tulsans were killed, and thousands were temporarily held in internment camps overseen by the National Guard.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal days before the rally, Trump tried to put a positive spin on the situation by claiming that he had made Juneteenth “famous.” He said he changed the rally date out of respect for two African American friends and supporters.
“I did something good. I made it famous. I made Juneteenth very famous,” Trump said. “It’s actually an important event, it’s an important time. But nobody had heard of it. Very few people have heard of it.”
Generations of Black Americans celebrated Juneteenth long before it became a federal holiday in 2021 with the stroke of former President Joe Biden’s pen.
Later in 2020, Trump sought to woo Black voters with a series of campaign promises, including establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday.
He lost the election, and that made it possible for Biden to sign the legislation establishing Juneteenth as the newest federal holiday.
Last year, Biden spoke briefly at a holiday concert on the South Lawn that featured performances by Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle. Former Vice President Kamala Harris danced onstage with gospel singer Kirk Franklin.
Biden was spending this year’s holiday in Galveston, Texas, where he was set to speak at a historic African Methodist Episcopal church.
Superville writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Calvin Woodward contributed to this report.
TULSA, Okla. — Tulsa’s new mayor on Sunday proposed a $100 million private trust as part of a reparations plan to give descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre scholarships and housing help in a city-backed bid to make amends for one of the worst racial attacks in U.S. history.
The plan by Mayor Monroe Nichols, the first Black mayor of Oklahoma’s second-largest city, would not provide direct cash payments to descendants or the last two centenarian survivors of the attack that killed as many as 300 Black people. He made the announcement at the Greenwood Cultural Center, located in the once-thriving district of North Tulsa that was destroyed by a white mob.
Nichols said he does not use the term reparations, which he calls politically charged, characterizing his sweeping plan instead as a “road to repair.”
“For 104 years, the Tulsa Race Massacre has been a stain on our city’s history,” Nichols said Sunday after receiving a standing ovation from several hundred people. “The massacre was hidden from history books, only to be followed by the intentional acts of redlining, a highway built to choke off economic vitality and the perpetual underinvestment of local, state and federal governments.
“Now it’s time to take the next big steps to restore.”
Nichols said the proposal wouldn’t require city council approval, although the council would need to authorize the transfer of any city property to the trust, something he said was highly likely.
The private charitable trust would be created with a goal to secure $105 million in assets, with most of the funding either secured or committed by June 1, 2026. Although details would be developed over the next year by an executive director and a board of managers, the plan calls for the bulk of the funding, $60 million, to go toward improving buildings and revitalizing the city’s north side.
“The Greenwood District at its height was a center of commerce,” Nichols said in a telephone interview. “So what was lost was not just something from North Tulsa or the Black community. It actually robbed Tulsa of an economic future that would have rivaled anywhere else in the world.”
Nichols’ proposal follows an executive order he signed earlier this year recognizing June 1 as Tulsa Race Massacre Observance Day, an official city holiday. Events Sunday in the Greenwood District included a picnic for families, worship services and an evening candlelight vigil.
Nichols also realizes the current national political climate, particularly President Trump’s sweeping assault on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, poses challenging political crosswinds.
“The fact that this lines up with a broader national conversation is a tough environment,” Nichols admitted, “but it doesn’t change the work we have to do.”
Jacqueline Weary, is a granddaughter of massacre survivor John R. Emerson, Sr., who owned a hotel and cab company in Greenwood that were destroyed. She acknowledged the political difficulty of giving cash payments to descendants. But at the same time, she wondered how much of her family’s wealth was lost in the violence.
“If Greenwood was still there, my grandfather would still have his hotel,” said Weary, 65. “It rightfully was our inheritance, and it was literally taken away.”
Tulsa is not the first U.S. city to explore reparations. The Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, was the first U.S. city to make reparations available to its Black residents for past discrimination, offering qualifying households $25,000 for home repairs, down payments on property, and interest or late penalties on property in the city. The funding for the program came from taxes on the sale of recreational marijuana.
Other communities and organizations that have considered providing reparations range from the state of California to cities including Amherst, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island; Asheville, North Carolina; and Iowa City, Iowa; religious denominations like the Episcopal Church; and prominent colleges like Georgetown University in Washington.
In Tulsa, there are only two living survivors of the Race Massacre, both of whom are 110 years old: Leslie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher. The women, both of whom were in attendance on Sunday, received direct financial compensation from both a Tulsa-based nonprofit and a New York-based philanthropic organization, but have not received any recompense from the city or state.
Damario Solomon-Simmons, an attorney for the survivors and the founder of the Justice for Greenwood Foundation, said earlier this year that any reparations plan should include direct payments to Randle and Fletcher and a victims’ compensation fund for outstanding claims.
A lawsuit filed by Solomon-Simmons on behalf of the survivors was rejected by the Oklahoma Supreme Court last year, dampening racial justice advocates’ hopes that the city would ever make financial amends.
