Tulsa King is one of the biggest hits on Paramount Plus, led by Sylvester Stallone and built from the ground up by Taylor Sheridan. But now that season 3 has wrapped and the show heads into the greenlit season 4, things are getting weird over there.
A new report from Variety says that Tulsa King season 4 is heading into production without an actual showrunner. This comes in the way of the firing of 26 members of the crew back in late October, including Stallone’s own stunt double. This was said to be “standard practice” in TV land, but that level of turnover is extremely unusual.
Previous showrunner Dave Erickson was already leaving the show after season 3, but now it’s been revealed that, at the moment, no one is officially replacing him. There is a “de facto” showrunner in the form of 101 Studios executive Scott Stone, working with two production managers who do not direct or write the show. The departed stuntman and stunt coordinator Freddie Pool told Variety: “[Stone] said, ‘We’re not going to have a showrunner. 101 is the showrunner.’ And I raised an eyebrow at that,” Poole says. “That was the writing on the wall for me. I knew at that point I better start looking out for myself.”
This is not even the first time this has happened. Tulsa King’s season 1 showrunner was Terence Winter, who left afterward, which led to a season 2 that did not have a true showrunner. Then, season 3 had Dave Erickson, who then left and is now once again being replaced by…no one, officially. Reportedly, that’s due to conflicts between Erickson and Sylvester Stallone, who wanted to go back to Winter. Erickson left but is still the showrunner of another ongoing Sheridan project, Jeremy Renner’s Mayor of Kingstown. In short, things are crazy over there.
As it stands, all this drama and turnover does not seem to have impacted the show negatively in terms of viewership or quality. It’s routinely one of Paramount Plus’s top viewed shows. It boasts a stellar 7.9/10 on IMDB, excellent in the context of that site, and an 88% critic score and 76% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes across its three seasons. Who needs showrunner consistency anyway?
In case you haven’t seen the show, here’s the synopsis:
The show manages to come out yearly, unlike many streaming productions, meaning we should see season 4 released in the fall of 2026, barring this recent chaos affecting that. It hasn’t so far, however.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/11/24/some-extremely-strange-news-about-tulsa-king-season-4/
