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Taylor Sheridan’s ‘Tulsa King’ Showcased Rarely Seen Gritty Side of Oklahoma

Tulsa King starring Sylvester Stallone has been able to showcase different sides of Oklahoma that you might not see. Of course, when thinking of Oklahoma, it is frequently depicted on screen as a peaceful place filled with scenic beauty. Tulsa King, though, presents a different-looking Oklahoma. And the credit for this work goes to the show’s production designer, Todd Jeffery.

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Tulsa King, created by Taylor Sheridan, stars Stallone as Dwight “The General” Manfredi, a Mafia capo who’s banished to Tulsa, Okla., by his New York underworld family after serving a 25-year prison sentence. Manfredi is a fish out of water, but the Brooklyn-born gangster wastes no time in organizing a new criminal empire made up of colorful Oklahomans.

‘Tulsa King’ Production Crew Ran Into Issue With Changing Climate In Oklahoma

Like Stallone’s character, Jeffery had never been to Oklahoma before working on the series. The unpredictable climate caught him off guard at first. “The weather changed drastically from day to day, and sometimes you’d wake up and there would be several inches of snow on the ground,” he says. “But when it melted away, it revealed places very similar to what you’d see in old Westerns. The oil industry kind of got its start there, so a lot of images from that time period are still floating around.”

Instead of celebrating the boomtown era of Oklahoma’s past, Jeffery’s work on Tulsa King captures the contemporary grittiness of the state’s second-largest city. From squalid strip clubs and dingy dive bars to ratty motels and abandoned steel mills, the show’s production design offers a visual tour of some of the seediest locations in Tulsa.

Creating ‘The Higher Plane’ Took Some Creative Work On Show

After arriving in Tulsa, Dwight Manfredi’s first stop is The Higher Plane, a weed dispensary located in a depressing commercial area not far from the banks of the Oklahoma River. Because many important scenes take place in and around the dispensary, Jeffery and his team needed a practical location to work with rather than attempt to cheat it on a studio set, Variety reports.

The solution was an old Texaco station that had not been functioning for many years. It was boarded up when they found it, and several windows were sealed with concrete blocks. The doors couldn’t open because of the junk stored inside. The entire structure was in serious disarray. “But its bones were spectacular,” Jeffery says.

Rather than mirror the stylish design of a high-end dispensary, Jeffery gave The Higher Plane a lovable sense of tackiness, derived mainly from the character Bodhi (played by Martin Starr), who owns and operates the business.