Tulsa King season 3 gives the show its best villain and its cleanest ending, and it never once makes Dwight Manfredi pay for anything, which keeps it a tier below the mob stories it borrows from.
Season 3 ran ten episodes on Paramount+ from September 21 to November 23, 2025. Dwight (Sylvester Stallone) buys the Montague distillery, inherits a hidden stash of 50-year bourbon valued around $150 million, and goes to war with Jeremiah Dunmire (Robert Patrick), a liquor baron with Dixie Mafia muscle who wanted the property first. FBI agent Musso (Kevin Pollak) spends the season holding Dwight’s freedom over his head.
Spoilers for the full season follow.
Bourbon, Fire, and Robert Patrick
Robert Patrick is the reason to watch. Dunmire’s men burn old Theo Montague alive in his house for selling to Dwight, and the finale answers that scene directly. Dwight beats Dunmire on the floor of his own estate, delivers the “Jesus lizard” speech, pours liquor over him, and lights it. The season opens and closes on the same crime, and Patrick plays every scene in between like a preacher who has already decided you are going to hell.
The distillery also gives the crew real work. Bodhi scrambles the Dunmires’ distribution site. Tyson gets played by a dancer named Serenity and loses the entire bourbon stash, then helps track it to a rail yard where Dwight trades a captured Cole Dunmire to get it back. Those middle episodes are the closest the season comes to a caper show, and they are the most fun it has.
The back half gets crowded. Quiet Ray comes down from New York, a bomb-maker called the Watchmaker starts targeting Dwight’s people, and Cal Thresher runs for governor in the background. Samuel L. Jackson arrives late as Russell Lee Washington Jr., a hitman sent to kill Dwight, and one episode later he is laughing his way through the raid on Dwight’s side. That is a spinoff introduction wearing a plot’s clothes.
The finale raid sums up the season. Dwight’s crew takes a compound guarded by 20 men at 3 a.m. with tear gas and “Bad to the Bone” on the soundtrack, and nobody on his side gets a scratch. It plays great in the moment. An hour later I could not name one thing Dwight risked.
Next to The Sopranos
The comparison is fair to make because the show invites it. Terence Winter, who wrote some of the best Sopranos hours, ran Tulsa King’s first season, and Dwight is a New York capo of Tony Soprano’s generation dropped into Oklahoma.
The two shows treat mistakes in opposite ways. In The Sopranos’ own third season, Jackie Aprile Jr. robs a card game and is dead in the snow by the finale, with Tony quietly signing off on it. In Tulsa King’s third season, Tyson loses $150 million in bourbon to the enemy and is benched for about an episode. Dwight lectures the crew about family, the stash comes back, and everyone is at the bar by the end.
Family works the same way. Dunmire kidnaps Dwight’s sister Joanne at the end of episode nine, and she is home unharmed before the finale’s last act. The Sopranos spent six seasons showing what Tony’s job did to Carmela, Meadow, and A.J. even when nobody laid a hand on them. Tulsa King uses family as a hostage to be rescued.
Cole Dunmire is the one thread with Sopranos weight. Beau Knapp plays a son who has spent his life doing his father’s dirty work, and his decision to hand Dwight a map of the estate should be the season’s hardest scene. The show gives it one conversation with Joanne and moves on to the gunfight. David Chase would have built half a season around that betrayal.
Then there are the endings. The Sopranos cut to black in a diner and left people arguing for almost 20 years. Tulsa King season 3 ends with a live band, a federal liquor permit, and the whole crew at the bar.
Next to The Departed
The Musso storyline is this season’s Departed plot. A mob boss is working with the FBI, the arrangement is off the books, and the agent running him has personal reasons for it. Musso wants the bomb-maker who killed his partner, and he uses Dwight to get him.
Scorsese treats that kind of deal as poison. Frank Costello has been feeding the FBI for years, Billy Costigan and Colin Sullivan are each living a lie inside the other’s organization, and the film’s tension comes from the fact that anyone can be found out in any scene. By the credits Costello, Costigan, Sullivan, and Captain Queenan are all dead. The movie needs 151 minutes to do it.
Tulsa King treats the same deal as a perk. Working for a fed never costs Dwight his standing with the crew at the Bred2Buck. The partnership ends with Musso walking into the bar carrying Dwight’s federal permit and asking where Dunmire’s body is. Dwight asks if it matters. Musso says only if somebody finds it.
That exchange is funny, and Pollak and Stallone have good timing together. It also shows the gap between the two. The Departed gets its suspense from identity, and season 3 has ten hours and no secret that could sink its lead. Yahoo’s finale recap argued the season could have been a movie, and the Departed’s runtime backs that up.
Where Tulsa King holds its own is warmth. Nobody in The Departed likes each other. Dwight’s crew does, and Stallone at 79 still sells both a punch and a punchline. That hangout quality is why the show is an easy weekly watch in a way neither comparison ever tried to be.
Who Should Pour a Glass
If the first two seasons worked for you, this one has a better villain than either and the only finale so far that does not end on a cliffhanger. If you bounced off the show because Dwight always wins, season 3 will not change your mind, and The Sopranos’ third season is sitting right there with “Pine Barrens” in it.
Season 4 has a more interesting board to play on. Thresher is governor, Margaret has taken a job advising him, and Dwight owns a fully legal distillery for the first time. A legitimate business with a governor watching it is the first setup on this show where winning a gunfight would not solve the problem.
Sources: Scraps from the Loft, Yahoo Entertainment, Ready Steady Cut, DMTalkies, Soap Central
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