Frisco King puts Samuel L. Jackson outside the law in one of America's safest suburbs

The first teaser for Frisco King arrived on October 15, and the premiere is close: December 18 on Paramount+, with two episodes up front and the remaining six rolling out on Fridays. Taylor Sheridan wrote all eight episodes himself, Samuel L. Jackson leads, and Sylvester Stallone makes a special appearance as Dwight Manfredi — the man whose Tulsa empire inspired the whole scheme.

Jackson plays Russell Lee Washington Jr., the gangster introduced opposite Stallone in Tulsa King season 3 as a backdoor pilot. The setup: Washington befriended Dwight during a ten-year federal stint, was sent to Tulsa by the Renzetti family to kill him, and chose franchise expansion over murder. In the series he sets up shop in Frisco, Texas, reading the wealthy suburb as a "hustler's paradise" and assembling a crew of series regulars played by Asa Germann, Kai Caster, Lilah Pate, and Savanna Gann.

The part Texans find funny

Frisco is a boomtown north of Dallas that routinely tops safest-cities rankings — a grid of master-planned subdivisions, corporate campuses, and the Cowboys' practice facility. Putting a crime lord there struck r/television as a punchline:

"How the f—k are they making this set in like the safest suburb in America."

— a commenter on r/television (3↑)

The sting in the thread is that the show almost had a legendary crime city. The project was originally announced as NOLA King, with Washington returning to the New Orleans he'd left 42 years earlier; the retitle moved him to the Dallas metroplex, where production is based out of Fort Worth. One commenter (5↑) put the fan theory of why plainly: "was almost set in a cool location like New Orleans, but Paramount always aims low and gives even lower."

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To be precise about what's confirmed: neither Paramount+ nor Sheridan has explained the move, and Sheridan's operation has been pouring money into Texas production for years, which is at least as plausible an explanation as cheapness. There's also a real genre argument hiding under the joke — Tulsa King worked because Dwight was a shark in a kiddie pool, and Frisco is an even safer, richer, more apologetically polite pool.

A mafia capo in Oklahoma was the original pitch. A New Orleans gangster among Dallas-area cul-de-sacs is the same joke with better lighting.

Whether that joke stretches to eight episodes rests almost entirely on Jackson, who at 77 is getting his first lead in the Sheridan-verse. December 18 is a crowded day to find out — Frisco King lands opposite Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three in theaters, which is exactly the kind of counterprogramming week where a streaming mob show can quietly clean up.

Previously we wrote: The Lowdown season 2 premiere and cast: Tommy Lee Jones plays the father Ethan Hawke's Lee told his daughter was dead