“Tulsa King” faces the same challenge confronting every location-driven TV show: in some way, it must make its setting feel interesting enough to rope in viewers unfamiliar with the place and its culture. Its initial premise does most of the work immediately: New York gangster Dwight Manfredi (Sylvester Stallone) is exiled to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he decides to build a new mob from scratch. Viewers can instantly relate to Manfredi’s fish-out-of-water circumstances — many of them have no concept of Tulsa, making it feel vaguely foreign despite its geographic proximity to American audiences.
“Tulsa King” immerses us in part by trading generic establishing shots of the city’s sparse skyline for gliding glances at the iconic Mayo Hotel and street-level peeks up at Tulsa’s few skyscrapers. Equally crucial to the show’s believability, though, is the way the characters dress. Costume designer Susan McCabe recognizes that, for many viewers, the cast’s styles and outfits will have great bearing on their first impressions of Oklahoma.
“Yeah, it’s like Siberia in their mind,” McCabe told IndieWire, speaking to how alien Tulsa can feel. “I mean, for Dwight’s character to be shipped there is a huge thing in a person’s mind to be like, ‘Oh, I’m getting sent to Siberia.’ He is like, ‘Oh no, this is fertile ground. I’m going to make this happen.’”
In the Season 2 premiere, Dwight has a local tailor fit his fledgling mobsters for a charity event. The ensuing montage — set to ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man” — brings us closer to these characters by cluing us into their tastes while keeping a grip on its sense of place. Dwight’s enterprise is a patchwork mob, and this sequence couldn’t make that more clear.
“With Mitch [Garrett Hedlund], I really just was thinking about his old rodeo-ness, so I really went so Western with his whole thing,” she said. “One of the things was ‘Electric Cowboy,’ the Robert Redford movie.”
As important as it was for her to reinforce the Oklahoma vibe, McCabe always made sure she did right by the characters. “I really just thought about the different characters. But we also only go episode by episode, so there is a growth and an evolution that happens.”
Other characters demanded different styles, such as Dwight’s eager personal driver Tyson (Jay Will) and dispensary owner Bodhi (Martin Starr). “With Jay Will, he had his crazy, outlandish suit. And then I did a Superfly look for him. And then with Bodhi, Terry [Winter, the showrunner] asked for the Sergeant Pepper thing, which I did, and the Austin Powers-looking thing. But then I just ended up doing a regular suit for him when he did his gangster look,” McCabe said.
McCabe’s familiarity with Oklahoma is largely limited to Oklahoma City, where Season 1 was mostly filmed. She reveled in small details that didn’t directly pertain to Tulsa-fying gangsters but nonetheless informed how she stitched together their wardrobes. (Season 2 was shot mostly in Atlanta, making McCabe’s six months in Oklahoma City for Season 1 even more invaluable.)
“I just couldn’t get over how Oklahoma City had those high-rise buildings,” she said. “Fancy restaurants that were super expensive, like New York expensive in the middle of Oklahoma. I was just amazed that there was this whole real city there, and I loved that…I just thought like, ‘Wow.’”
All of this informed how she tackled her designs. “The Myriad [Botanical] Gardens was right across the street, but there was nobody walking around, which was amazing to me. [That knowledge] has nothing to do with what you want to know about characters. But all of this is what goes into my bloodstream.” Her brief visit to Tulsa inspired similar feelings. “And then we shot in Tulsa, which also seemed really cultural. I went to the bowling alley, not that that’s not a tourist place, but it was fantastic. It just seemed like, ‘Oh my God, this is my aesthetic. I love this.’”
New episodes of “Tulsa King” stream on Paramount+ on Sundays through the series finale on Octover 27.