The reductive take on Taylor Sheridan-made media— and perhaps particularly, the gritty and rugged Paramount+ series “Mayor Of Kingstown” (co-created with Hugh Dillon, one of the series co-stars)— is that it’s macho, maybe even toxically masculine; narratives about aggressive men that feel they must defend their fiefdoms, no matter the size, no matter the cost. In that sense, Sheridan’s work feels so innately American, and maybe that’s why he gets labeled as a Red State creator so often, given so many of his gruff characters seem to have a “don’t tread on me” philosophy of life (think the beautiful loser criminals of “Hell or Highwater”).
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Maybe some of that is true, but another take is that Sheridan’s work is often about people—usually men, yes—who are the products of their (often unhealthy or inhospitable) environments, how they relate to the land around them, and how they’re born from them (even Angelina Jolie’s firefighter in “Those Who Wish Me Dead” adheres to this model). Sheridan’s “Wind River,” for example, starring Jeremy Renner, is all about the practical, pragmatic men who know the wintry land around them is unforgiving, cruel, and hostile, and one misstep can mean your doom. It’s a land of wolves and sheep, and one has to behave accordingly in such a setting if one plans to survive.
In “Mayor of Kingstown,” now entering its second season, Jeremy Renner’s Mike McLusky is undoubtedly a product of his environment, perhaps never even considering how toxic it is because he’s been born into it, and it’s all he knows. Kingstown is a city where the business of incarceration is the only business that thrives or matters. The family’s matriarch, Miriam McLusky (Dianne Wiest), teaches inmates in a female prison and detests the world her sons are part of but is still innately complicit in it all. Mitch McLusky (Kyle Chandler) was known as “The Mayor” of the town, the power broker middle man between the inside and out—those incarcerated and those who kept them locked out.
It’s a corrupt, poisonous system, and it’s all this family has ever known. And as season one showed when Mitch was shot and killed, violent consequences are always in its orbit. So, while “Mayor of Kingtown” considered a stark and harsh look at systemic racism, corruption, and inequality, and the notions of bringing order and justice to a town that has neither, on the micro level, it was also about a man thrust into a merciless role he was never supposed to have. Learning to sink or swim fast and not having the tact, diplomacy, and calm temperament to pull it all off, Mike is seemingly always on the edge of some catastrophe, but maybe the balls and gumption to manage it nonetheless.
I would also love to tell you that following Jeremy Renner’s near-tragic accident and seeming brush with death—thank god he survived—it makes one see his prison crime drama series, “The Mayor Of Kingstown,” in a new light. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, but one supposes it gives one the moral or human duty to not just write off the series without trying to understand it.
In the way that Sheridan looks at his series as long-form movies, ‘Kingtown’ season two isn’t really a second chapter, but instead, immediately picking up where season one left off without so much of a beat.
Following the violent Kingstown Prison riot, chaos and retribution reign. With the jail still on an inoperable lockdown and most of its leadership dead, a newly formed “tent city” in the yard is where prisoners live in a more hostile and dehumanizing environment. Symbiotic in their relationships, bedlam within the prison means anarchy on the streets, with gang leadership out for blood, vengeance, and power grabs. Correctional officers were violently raped and assaulted inside, and they, too, thirst for revenge when tent city is up and running. Kingstown is about to blow, and as the defacto new Mayor, Mike is desperate to find a solution before the national guard is called in and Kingstown is on the national evening news.
Deverin “Bunny” Washington (Tobi Bamtefa), leader of the Crips in Kingstown—
who peacefully co-exists with Mike and his grand “fixer”/referee role— but is hot as hell from all the brethren recently killed inside— is the key to stability. So as Mike and Bunny strategize about what must be done to solve the leadership void on the inside, Mike comes up with a bold but risky plan to make it all work.
Meanwhile, in storyline C, Kyle McLusky (Taylor Handley), Mike’s younger brother, begins his new job with the Michigan State Police, trying to steer his life away from the radioactivity of Kingstown. The nature of nurture of it all, however, means Kyle can’t seem to take the noxiousness of Kingstown out of himself, even living miles away from it.
Let’s not forget the Milo Sunter (Aidan Gillen) of it all. The imprisoned Russian mobster quietly escaped from the prison in the unrest of the riot. And while Mike knows he has to quell the cities violence immediately, he’s constantly keeping one eye in the back of his head focused on the volatile and dangerous Sunter, the payback he wants for Mike meddling on his outside affairs, and the business with Iris (Emma Laird), one of his smooth-talking escorts.
Essentially, it’s a season of escalation in every sense, all parties going into aggressive overdrive in hopes of ruling this kingdom and doing so, written in blood as a cost for all the territory they’ve lost, personal or otherwise. Season two of ‘Kingstown’ is an anxious and jittery spinning plates game for Mike, overseeing multiple hazards and buying time to keep them up in the air before they come crashing down, causing further consequential damage.
OK, now, you hopefully understand “Mayor Of Kingstown,” but is it good, and does it have much to say about the prison industrial complex and its mechanics? Well, it’s a watchable show, mostly, even though it does traffic in some machismo cop/tough guy cliches and compelling at times. But it arguably doesn’t have much to say about the prison system other than it is, in military parlance, totally FUBAR. In fact, ‘Kingstown’ makes an unintentionally compelling argument for razing it to the ground and starting anew with a more humanistic, compassionate system that we all know will never happen in our lifetime, especially in the capitalistic conveyor belt nightmare that is the impending slow doom of America which ‘Kingstown’ alludes to, it’s so dire and bleak.
At the center of it is Renner, the primarily calm and collected strategist, trying to manage the madness, trying to protect his loved one, save the baby bird he found (Iris), and please everyone but himself. Mike has “nothing left to lose,” so he’s almost the soulless merchant go-between man. And yet, he’s got the heart-of-gold morality that so many Sheridan characters have. They can be brusque, severe, rough-around-the-edges—just like the environments that shaped them—but at the end of the day, they’re hoping to do the right thing. “Yellowstone” in the Detroit area, essentially? Hardly, and yet the thematic connections are unmissable.
Ultimately, the “Mayor Of Kingstown,” like Mike McLusky, might be too consumed with power vacuums and containing multiple fires to consider its bigger picture. Is this system, like this show, sustainable? That’s unclear, and some gazing beyond the navel would be healthy for it. One hopes Renner’s injury doesn’t make any decisions for the show, and it can decide where it’s going on its own terms. [B-]