Among the many versions of America on parade in the ever-expanding universe of Taylor Sheridan, the one portrayed in Mayor of Kingstown is surely the bleakest. As AI helpfully informs us: “The show offers little respite, depicting extreme violence, moral ambiguity, and systemic failure without much sugarcoating.”
Yet the longer it goes on, the more addictive it becomes. Now in the middle of season 4, the show continues to tighten its tendrils of menace, thuggery and corruption with seemingly no concern for the viewer’s delicate sensibilities. Much of its allure stems from its impeccable casting, as well as the intimidating grittiness of its locations. Its fictional setting is the bleak Michigan burg of Kingstown (though it’s actually shot in and around Pittsburgh), where the temperature always looks as if it’s hovering around freezing and the inhabitants struggle to eke out a meagre living. Freight trains dragging their endless strings of wagons with an air of infinite weariness are a routine feature of the landscape.
In the midst of all this, Jeremy Renner, miraculously recovered after being horribly crushed by a snowplough three years ago, plays Mike McLusky (pictured above with Taylor Handley as his brother Kyle). He is the so-called Mayor of Kingstown, a role he inherited from his older brother Mitch who was murdered in the first series, though the title of “Mayor” is an honorific. Nobody elected him, and there isn’t a formal job description, but he’s essentially a fixer and troubleshooter, continually mediating between the police, various criminal gangs, the prison system and prosecutors. He has an office and a PA, but the job is whatever he makes it. It isn’t clear who pays him, though apparently, among other things, he gets a retainer for being an informant for the FBI.
Despite its apparently anonymous remoteness, Kingstown appears to be a magnet for all kinds of organised crime, with murderous Russians and merciless Colombian cartels littering the neighbourhood with bodies (sometimes decapitated). In earlier seasons, chief bad guy was the creepy and merciless Milo Sunter (a smirking Aidan Gillen), who was responsible for (among other things) a whole bus-load of corpses, an incredibly violent prison break and a bomb attack on the funeral of Mike’s mother, Mariam.
The new villain on the block is Frank Moses (Lennie James), a Detroit gangster who has stepped in to exploit the Kingstown power vacuum. The bespectacled Moses has a superficially benign and reasonable demeanour, calculated to make his bloodthirsty savagery all the more shocking. To Mike’s consternation, Moses has lured Mike’s buddy Bunny (Jobi Bamtefa) into his sinister orbit – Bunny may be a villain, but he’s Mike’s villain, and also the show’s most larger-than-life character.
For all the complicated cross-currents of plot and character, Kingstown is a story about families of various kinds. The various crime outfits, certainly, but most of all the McLusky clan. Mike feels duty bound to carry on the work of his late brother, and now he has serious concerns about his younger brother Kyle (Taylor Handley). Kyle is an officer in the Kingstown police, but is enduring a star-crossed fate.
Not only did he inadvertently shoot their mother during a chaotic gun battle, but his shooting of rogue SWAT officer Robert Sawyer has now landed him in jail. Being a cop, he’s a marked man, and had barely heard his cell door clang behind him before he was subjected to a savage beating. Mike is doing his darndest to protect his little bro, but he’s not getting much help from the steely new prison governor, Nina Hobbs (Edie “Carmela Soprano” Falco, pictured above). The show’s depiction of the brutality and squalor of prison life is another of its defining characteristics, so you might argue it has some social value as a cautionary tale. But fun? Not much of that, though there’s no denying that Mayor of Kingstown exerts a formidable grip.
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