Photo: Dennis P. Mong Jr./Paramount+
From the start, Mayor of Kingstown has been a show about the precarious balances that keep one small Michigan city — the home of multiple prison facilities and a lot of citizens who work inside them — from sliding into violent chaos. In the first episode, we met Mitch McLusky (Kyle Chandler), an unelected political fixer who ran messages and resolved beefs between Kingstown’s cops, gangs, convicts, and guards. By the end of that first hour, Mitch had been gunned down by a gangster who lacked the proper respect for the man’s position. Ever since, Mitch’s ex-con younger brother Mike (Jeremy Renner) has struggled to keep the peace.
His job got harder in the season two finale when Miriam McLusky (Dianne Wiest) — the family’s matriarch and conscience — was shot dead during an armed standoff involving Mitch and Mike’s youngest brother Kyle (Taylor Handley), a Kingstown cop. Then, just when the situation couldn’t seem to get any worse, in the season three premiere, some mysterious malefactor sets off a car bomb at Miriam’s funeral.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Hello, everyone! Welcome to Vulture’s coverage of Mayor of Kingstown, the Paramount+ crime series that has stealthily been one of the more popular shows on streaming for the past three years without drawing a lot of critical attention. It’s a series that deserves a closer look for a few reasons:
1. It’s yet another product of the Taylor Sheridan TV factory. Yellowstone’s head honcho has been ridiculously busy lately as a producer, writer, and director, lending his name and pen to two Yellowstone prequels (1883 and 1923) plus the series Tulsa King, Special Ops: Lioness and Lawman: Bass Reeves. He has connected to something within the current cultural zeitgeist, and it’s worth examining just what it might be. Why do viewers respond so strongly to Sheridan’s love for soul-sick sad-sack can-do dudes like Mayor of Kingstown’s Mitch, Mike, and Kyle? (And does this say anything about the state of our politics today? I’m sure we’ll get to that by the end of this season.)
2. Mayor of Kingstown is the rare Sheridan project that maybe — maybe — isn’t under his total control. It was co-created with Hugh Dillon, a Yellowstone actor and former Canadian punk rocker, who also plays police detective Ian Ferguson on this show. Sheridan notoriously said during the writers’ strike that he’s not big on writers’ rooms and prefers to work alone; and yet he was only credited on two scripts in Mayor of Kingstown’s second season. (He is credited with writing all of season one.) The season three premiere was penned by screenwriter Dave Erickson, a veteran of Fear the Walking Dead and Sons of Anarchy. Can other voices temper Sheridan’s sometimes exhausting macho cynicism?
3. The show feels like a throwback to the early days of antihero-driven prestige cable dramas. There are elements of Oz in the prison milieu, plus healthy dollops of Sons of Anarchy, The Sopranos, The Wire and The Shield in the matter-of-fact depiction of criminals and lawmen warily working side-by-side. Do these kinds of stories still play in the 2020s, or do they feel like decade-old leftovers?
Let’s cover that third part first because there’s undeniably a warmed-over quality to this season three premiere. Genre-rooted prestige dramas tend to follow intense, deck-clearing season finales with soft resets. So it goes with this episode, “Soldier’s Heart,” which quickly moves past all the resolutions in the season two finale to introduce two — and possibly three — new antagonists.
Russian mob boss Milo (Aidan Gillen) is off the table now, but he’s been immediately replaced in Kingstown by Konstantin (Yorick van Wageningen), an elegant older gentleman who establishes his authority by murdering Milo’s ex Tatiana (Gratiela Brancusi), leaving her newborn baby motherless. Meanwhile, the Aryan gang appears to be getting a scary-looking new boss as Merle Callahan (Richard Brake) transfers into one of the Kingstown prisons. And while the assistant district attorney Evelyn Foley (Necar Zadegan) isn’t a new character, in the premiere she does a heel-turn of sorts, letting her occasional lover Mike know she’s done looking the other way at the mess in Kingstown and is about to become “the fucking janitor.”
But those are all complications for another day. Most of “Soldier’s Heart” has to do with Mike and his minions deciding how to respond to the funeral bombing. How the situation plays out represents what Mayor of Kingstown does best.
What sets this show apart from other crime dramas is its setting: a town where the volatile social structures inside of the prisons have spread to the world just outside the walls. In Kingstown, the actual law doesn’t matter — and neither does justice, really. Mike’s job is to keep the good people (which he estimates to be about 5 percent of the locals) and the bad people (another 5 percent) placated enough that they won’t disrupt the lives of the remaining 90 percent of Kingstonians, who could honestly break either way, depending on how much any given problem affects them personally.
So after the bomb goes off, Mike consults with Kyle, Ferguson, and the ruthless SWAT team leader Robert Sawyer (Hamish Allan-Headley) about who to target. It doesn’t matter who’s actually responsible — only who can afford to take the hit.
The cops want to go after Bunny (Tobi Bamtefa), the Crips-affiliated drug-dealing kingpin who is one of Mike’s main resources for controlling crime in Kingstown. Mike would rather move the bullseye to the Aryans, who have some scuzzy operatives working outside the prison that no one will miss. But Robert — who was hospitalized by mob bozos at the end of season two — goes rogue during the raid on the Aryan compound and blows the whole place up. Though the Aryans seem to retaliate inside the prison by having somebody shanked, the arrival of Callahan in the episode’s closing minutes would seem to suggest that Mike’s problems aren’t over. (Ferguson warns early on that no matter who they target, Mike will be the one suffering the blowback, to which Mike scoffs, “When is it not?”)
The other major incident in this episode is when Kyle’s pregnant wife, Tracy (Nishi Munshi), heads to the hospital after her water breaks. But this isn’t the kind of show where domestic melodrama matters much. Kyle doesn’t rush to his wife’s side. Neither does Mike. They’ve got more important work to do.
It’s the anchoring premise of Mayor of Kingstown — and what marks it as a Taylor Sheridan show, for better and worse — that Mike can’t afford to take even a minute off. Sheridan’s preferred protagonists are burned-out guys who bear the crushing weight of responsibilities that they insist they want to unload if only they trusted anyone else to take them on. In that way, they’re a lot like their creator (or at least the version of himself that he presents publicly). No one else could juggle all that they have to juggle, they insist … as all their bowling pins and plates and knives come crashing to the ground.
• “Soldier’s Heart” was directed by Christoph Schrewe, a German filmmaker who has been active in American TV for the past decade, helming episodes of Mr. Robot, Fear the Walking Dead, and Snowpiercer, among others. Mayor of Kingstown isn’t exactly the most stylish show, but I do like how its directors stage action in places that look dreary and gray, emphasizing the overall bleakness of this town. Even a scene in this episode shot in one of Kingstown’s “nice” neighborhoods is filled with sad signifiers, like old Christmas trees on the curb and dingy patches of snow all around.
• Another source of brewing trouble for the McLuskys: Iris (Emma Laird), the prostitute/damsel Mike rescued earlier in the series. While making herself useful around the house after Miriam’s death, she helps herself to some of the old lady’s pills. She also begins behaving suspiciously affectionately toward Mike. Kyle can see red flags already and warns his brother to watch out. But Mike? He always thinks he’s two steps ahead of everything, so he waves off Kyle’s concerns. Stay tuned.
• In the series premiere, Miriam chastised Mike for sticking around Kingstown — a place he claims to hate — rather than leaving and forging his own path. When he said he didn’t know how to leave, his mom replied, “Michael, you just go.” There are echoes of that scene this week when Mike complains to his secretary Rebecca (Nichole Galicia) that he’s had an exhausting day and that it’s “far from over.” She reminds him that he can make his day be over any time he wants. All he has to do — all he ever has to do — is go home.
