A 2022 article for Variety reveals that Stallone’s superb Paramount+ TV series Tulsa King came together in just a week.

Show creator Taylor Sheridan told Variety that the process of coming up with the idea for the show, writing the pilot script and getting Stallone onboard took about a week.

“I was talking with a producer, and it’s COVID,” he says. “Everyone’s kind of going stir-crazy. He was asking me about ideas. I said, ‘Look, all you need, in my opinion, to have an interesting TV show is take a really fascinating character and drop them in a world that we don’t know anything about.’”

From there, Sheridan dreamed up the character of Dwight “The General” Manfredi. With time on his hands because of the pandemic, Sheridan dove into writing the script.

“I call [the producer] two days later and said, ‘Hey, I wrote that thing we talked about.’”

 

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Sheridan then phoned Stallone directly to talk about the show. The actor was at home in Florida and was also going a bit stir-crazy during the early days of the lockdown. A day after Sheridan sent him the script, Stallone was back on the phone. “‘I love it. When do we shoot it?’” Sheridan says the “Rocky” legend told him. Days later, the two sold the show to Paramount.

Tulsa King follows New York mafia capo Dwight “The General” Manfredi (Stallone) just after he is released from prison after 25 years and unceremoniously exiled by his boss to set up shop in Tulsa, OK. Realizing that his mob family may not have his best interests in mind, Dwight slowly builds a “crew” from a group of unlikely characters, to help him establish a new criminal empire in a place that to him might as well be another planet.