These limits are not only physical. Based on the two advanced shows made available to reporters, there is an early comedy scene in “Tulsa King” where Dwight is accidentally stoned and released. He’s been in prison for a quarter of a century, and now he feels like Rip Van Winkle. He is not angry, but confused – “The phone is a camera!” ; “And these pronouns. what [expletive] with pronouns? – And even though it’s “all for a change”, he feels that “someone keeps moving the goalposts.”
Sheridan’s shows are often described as watching the “red case”—a reductive view given that “Yellowstone” was Top Rated Drama On TV last season. But Dwight’s monologue is at least a welcome mat for viewers who haven’t had to go to prison to feel alienated or confused by rapid changes in technology and social mores. (Winter said that the scene is not meant to be explicitly political — “not just a statement about delusion,” he puts it — but rather, “in general, about how quickly things can change.”) The scene will irritate some sensibilities, and as it continues, It takes a turn.
“When I was a kid, in my neighborhood, at least I knew who I was,” Dwight told a weary dispensary owner played by Martin Starr. Then he shrugged his shoulders, and his voice subsided. “Or I thought I did,” he says. “But honestly? Nobody knows anything.”
This also sounded like holiness: humility in the face of the gods. Stallone told me that humility became more and more profound, as he got older and life became more and more about loss. The children grew up and left. Marriages became difficult. The ages of the bodies. Friends died.
“From 45 down, it’s a subtraction,” he said. “How do you deal with the subtraction?”
Minutes later, he answered his question: You are adapting. go the distance. You live up to the challenges. As an artist, he still believed in underdog stories, he said, in “Man Against Order, Woman Against Order, Modern Mythology, Rising Above.” The fight may not look or feel the way it used to, but you keep fighting anyway. (“Expendables 4”? due next year.)
And what do you do when they put the odds against you?
“You drown or you swim,” he said.
