Mayor of Kingstown, the new series from writer-director Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone), is a very bad show. So comprehensive is its failure, in fact, that I was almost relieved, finishing the episodes screened for critics, to recall that the program exists to prop up ViacomCBS’s neglected streaming platform, Paramount+. Were it not for this deliberate market function, Sheridan’s latest venture might lie beyond the reach of human explanation altogether.
Like its homonymic cousin Mare of Easttown, Paramount+’s new drama thrusts an aging star into an atmosphere of unremitting bleakness. The headliner in this instance is Jeremy Renner, who proceeds with all the one-dimensional mopery that Kate Winslet brought to HBO’s hard-bitten snoozefest earlier this year. Renner, a limited actor in the best of circumstances, plays Mike McLusky, an emotionally stunted hooligan whose range of expression stretches from dour to glower. Along with his brother, Mitch (Kyle Chandler), Mike serves as a mediator, errand boy, and all-purpose fixer in the fictional hamlet of Kingstown, Michigan, a burg containing seven prisons and nearly as many inmates as residents.
Among the initial challenges confronting Mayor of Kingstown’s viewers is the question of which McLusky brother holds actual elected office. The answer, obnoxiously murky until well into the second episode, is neither, despite the series’ name and a number of confusing suggestions to the contrary. Rather, Mike and Mitch operate an extralegal (and FBI-protected) consulting shop designed to keep the peace between convict and guard, state and citizen. Need a dope-filled tennis ball whacked into a prison yard? Mike will bribe a schoolboy to fetch a racket. Afraid that your incarcerated son is about to become someone’s “girlfriend”? Mitch knows exactly how the young man’s suicide attempt should be staged.
One gets the impression, observing the McLuskys’ mercenary misadventures, that Mayor of Kingstown could have been great fun had not the series determined to shut out any glimmer of playfulness. Watching Chandler, for instance, one comes away, as always, with the sense of pugnacity lightly worn, as if every dispute might soon erupt into a round of jokes. Similarly intriguing is the presence of Aidan Gillen (The Wire, Game of Thrones), whose incorrigible boyishness might have been a bankable asset were not his crime-boss character so inexplicably underused. Indeed, the problem with both of these potential casting triumphs is that the show belongs so fully to Renner that little space remains for his higher caliber co-stars. Presented with a surfeit of interesting talent, Sheridan has built his series around a leading man of such joylessness that the production comes to feel like the “before” scenes in an advertisement for Zoloft.
Making matters worse is the fact that Mayor of Kingstown delights in nothing so much as the notion that the human experiment is irremediably flawed. Staging a home invasion/murder in episode one, Sheridan puts together a scene that is as flat and pitiless as any dramatic set piece in recent memory. Lingering inside an execution chamber for a gruesome 9-minute ordeal, the show underscores its materialistic, man-as-meat pessimism. By the time a child burns up in a meth lab explosion during episode three’s cold open, audiences will have come to recognize the show’s nasty modus operandi. All of the darkness of life is to be accentuated, leaned into, and exposed. None of the wonder may be so much as glimpsed.
It is a curiosity of the contemporary media landscape that network television is often woker and more didactic than the average streaming-service alternative. To name just one example, Queen Latifah is happy to instruct us rubes on CBS’s weekly crime procedural The Equalizer, but one struggles to imagine her doing so with equal shamelessness on Netflix. Given this pattern, it is tempting to think of Mayor of Kingstown as a show tugged uneasily between two worlds. Its appearance may be that of an expensively mounted prestige drama, but it is nonetheless the exclusive property of CBS.
One consequence of this strange chimerism is the fact that the series’ marketing campaign seems all but intended to entice an audience that will hate it. Like many viewers, I learned of Mayor of Kingstown’s existence while watching the Eye Network’s college football broadcasts and was immediately drawn to the show’s grittiness, star power, and pedigree. (The excellent Antoine Fuqua is an executive producer.) What I found upon tuning in, however, was a program that not only holds the “Let’s go Brandon” crowd in disdain but does so with all the subtlety of a runaway Mack truck. Anti-American screeds delivered by Dianne Wiest, as Mike and Mitch’s unsmiling mother, are but one recurring example. That clicking noise one hears is the sound of a million red-state viewers canceling their Paramount+ trial subscriptions.
Yet even if Mayor of Kingstown were to leash its aggressively liberal politics, audiences would still have to contend with some of the worst writing to come out of Hollywood this year. Stumbling into a small fortune, a thug narrates his discovery despite the fact that he is alone in a room. (“What’s this? Looks like the mother lode!”) Quarreling over the family trade, Mike and his mother say exactly what they mean and little else. (Miriam to her son: “I don’t even like you.”) Throughout the early going, Renner provides expository voice-overs so lazy they might have been composed by Google Autofill. That the Oscar-nominated Sheridan can write a script is indisputable. Nevertheless, the author of Sicario and Hell or High Water has taken a major step backward here.
Monotonous and preachy, relentless in its lack of charm, Mayor of Kingstown is exactly the show that we don’t need in our present cultural moment. Let the masochists hang around for a few more hours of gloomy tutelage. I, for one, am going back to the ball game.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
