Taylor Sheridan makes movies and TV shows about rugged men doing rugged things in rugged locales. On the heels of the return of his cable-TV hit Yellowstone, he delivers more of the same with Mayor of Kingstown, a 10-episode Paramount+ drama (Nov. 14)—co-created by and co-starring Yellowstone vet Hugh Dillon—about Mike McLusky, the unofficial ruler of the fictional Michigan city of Kingstown, home to seven prisons in a 10-mile radius. A hardscrabble working-class enclave where tensions run high between inmates and guards, cops and drug dealers, and criminals and civilians, Kingstown is a quagmire where everyone is literally and figuratively trapped by circumstance and position. Consequently, it’s Mike’s job to establish and maintain peace in a place that’s known precious little of it.
As embodied by Jeremy Renner, Mike is an ex-con who’s at once grimly resigned to his fate as a Kingstown lifer and a dreamer who longs to bolt for a Wyoming school where they teach students to cook in Dutch ovens and over open campfires. It’s a reverie of back-to-nature escape, and, coupled with Mayor of Kingstown’s depiction of its urban setting—a collection of gray stone and concrete jails, run-down projects, and ramshackle offices—it marks these proceedings as the flip side to Sheridan’s usual portrait of the rural West as the epicenter of American contentment. Mike is a lost soul caught between corrupting civilization and the liberating wild, and it’s in the former that he chooses to stay, plying his trade alongside his older brother Mitch (Kyle Chandler) and his younger cop sibling Kyle (Taylor Handley).
Given that Renner is the show’s headliner, it’s reasonable to assume during the premiere that he’s Kingstown’s de facto mayor. However, that title actually belongs to Mitch, a gregarious wheeler-dealer who’s followed in his dad’s footsteps by serving as a borderline-crooked facilitator for the many factions inhabiting this fraught environment. Sheridan doesn’t come right out and explicate what Mitch and sidekick Mike’s job entails, and that vagueness carries over to an initial bit of conflict involving a young prison guard, an incriminating letter that he wrote and is now in the possession of the Crips gang, and a blackmail scheme being orchestrated by the Crips’ leader Bunny (Tobi Bamtefa), who runs his drug-dealing operation from a lawn chair outside his apartment building. Viewers are dropped into that plot thread in medias res, and its particulars never make much sense. Nonetheless, they also don’t really matter, since their purpose is merely to illustrate that Mitch and Mike spend their days and nights trying to keep things from exploding.
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That quickly proves impossible, thanks to an assignment Mitch is stuck with courtesy of Vera (Elizaveta Neretin), the stripper-wife of criminal bigwig Milo (Aidan Gillen), who wants Mitch to retrieve a buried satchel containing $200,000. This is the sort of not-quite-legal toil that earns Mitch and Mike a living, albeit apparently not a very lucrative one, according to their mom Miriam (Dianne Wiest), a hardcase who teaches history classes at the women’s prison and is fiercely devoted to, and protective of, her boys. In the first two episodes of Mayor of Kingstown (which were all that was provided to process), Miriam serves little purpose, but Wiest’s participation suggests she’ll soon have a far bigger role to play in this saga. At outset, the focus is on Mitch and Mike, whose situation becomes perilous when a hood named Alberto (Michael Reventar) takes a liking to Vera, visits her at the club, and then follows her back home to sexually assault her, leading to a confrontation that ends in violence and tips Alberto off to Milo’s loot.
There’s a bombshell twist near the end of Mayor of Kingstown’s first episode that canny viewers will see coming, and it compels Mike to reckon with his untenable state of affairs. Should he continue the family business despite hating it? Or should he take off while he’s still breathing? A mournful trip to his remote cabin results in an encounter with the very sort of imposing bear that he fears, and as an individual committed to aiding various ferocious animals—be they killers or federal agents who want to pay him to work as an informant—Mike naturally opts to feed the creature, just as he soon decides that he belongs in Kingstown. His subsequent decision to accompany a woman and her mother to the lethal-injection execution of their son, quietly explaining each step of the process to them, further illustrates his role as this area’s chief mediator—equal parts bagman, gangster, therapist, pseudo-cop, and boatman on the river Styx.
Renner affects a haunted expression throughout Mayor of Kingstown’s early going, his world-weariness only interrupted by flashes of fury when he or his comrades are threatened. His Mike believes that he’s bending the law for the greater good, upholding some semblance of order in a community that’s constantly on the verge of chaos, and Renner’s lived-in performance is a solid axis around which Sheridan builds his show’s scenario. Unfortunately, its initial two installments are largely setup, only hinting at the messiness to follow, much of which will apparently have to do with Milo’s decision to use working-girl Iris (Emma Laird) to control Mike and, by extension, all of Kingstown. At present, those plans are murky. Yet if Sheridan’s prior output is any indication—including Yellowstone, which has delivered consistent intrigue via stories about powerful men who are besieged on all sides—they should beget considerable suspense.
The real promise of Mayor of Kingstown comes from its chosen milieu, which is comprised of stock elements—cops, killers, prison guards, grieving families, exotic dancers, etc.—but boasts uniquely tangled-up power dynamics ripe for exploration. Rife with intersecting forces that both need—and seek dominion over—each other, Kingstown is a landscape unlike those usually traversed by Sheridan or featured in the myriad prestige TV offerings that have preceded it. Whether Sheridan and Dillon can make it as compelling a venue to visit as Montana remains to be seen. But between their star and their setting, they certainly have the pieces in place for a potential binge-worthy affair.
