Mayor of Kingstown Review

With a cast that boast names like Jeremy Renner, Diane Wiest, and Kyle Chandler, and Taylor Sheridan – the co-creator of Yellowstone – as a co-creator and showrunner (the other half of the creative team is Hugh Dillion, who also co-stars on the series), one can’t help but hope a series like Mayor of Kingstown will live up to the pedigree both in front of and behind the camera. Unfortunately, after watching the series’ first two episodes provided for critics, Kingstown was pretty disappointing.

With the caveat that two episodes is rarely enough time to make a definitive decision when it comes to a television series, these first two episodes don’t provide a whole lot of hope for what might be coming in the future. The basic set-up for the series is that the McLusky boys (Chandler as Mitch, the brains behind the operation, Renner as Mike, the muscle, and Taylor Handley as Kyle, the youngest and only one who went straight – albeit not completely straight – with his career choice) are something akin to fixers in Kingstown. They can get gang members goods in prison, help facilitate the movement of money from one criminal to another, or get the cops or the feds off your back in a pinch. Mitch is the mastermind of the operation, Mike doles out the punishment, and Kyle is a local cop who seems to want to stay on the right side of the law. There doesn’t appear to be anyone or anything that can touch the brothers. And, when someone tries, they get smacked down pretty quickly. Oh, and Wiest plays Miriam McLusky, the boys’ mother who doesn’t appear to be very happy with their line of work – although she doesn’t really say or do all that much in the initial two episodes, so it’s hard to get a real read on the character.

It’s an interesting enough premise with a good cast. But the execution is a mess. The only actor who seems able to translate the lackluster dialogue into anything resembling believable delivery is Renner, although he has his own character problems as you can’t determine just what exactly Mike wants out of his chosen career. Does he want to keep being a tough guy? Does he want more from his life that this path? There are moments that seem to hint that he does, but the series also seems far more concerned with showing us how nonchalantly he accepts the violence in his profession and asking us to speculate on just what that says about him.

However, the real problem with the series comes when it turns its focus to its female characters and its characters of color. As you may have deduced by now, the main characters within the story are white. But, as is often the case when you are setting a story in prisons and on the streets, there are a host of characters of color who dot the landscape filling the roles of gangsters, murderers, and drug dealers. That’s absolutely the case here, with criminals of the weeks showing up having committed serious and heinous crimes and being spotlighted as someone who needs the Mayor’s* help. This use of minority actors in stereotypical roles doesn’t provide a fresh perspective on the issues the series seeks to highlight (which, according to the press release, includes systemic racism). If the series had opted to provide more actors of color in key roles and with positions within the series that don’t fall into the realm of stereotype, perhaps that goal would have been met. As the series currently stands, the show is simply another series where a white lead is asked to save characters of color.

*Just in case it wasn’t clear, while Mitch McLusky is referred to as the Mayor of Kingstown, he’s not the actual Mayor. We haven’t yet met that person, although we are informed, in some clunky expositional dialogue, that even the Mayor of the town acknowledges that Mitch holds all the cards.

But some of the worst characterization and writing surrounds the series’ female characters. Out of the three named female characters we meet in the first two episodes, two appear topless nearly immediately after we meet them, and the third is Wiest’s character, the mother archetype. I had hoped we were well passed the time in television where writers had to introduce female characters nearly naked in order to make them interesting to the viewing audience, but here we are. Add in that we learn precious little about either of these women after our introductions to them (although one is Emma Laird’s Iris, who is included within the series’ main credits, so I suspect she will have more to do than advertised down the line), this choice to present the women as sexual objects and not fully formed characters is incredibly disappointing. The writers didn’t see fit to introduce Renner’s character with a nude shot of him, why is it ok to do the same with one of your female leads?

So, is Mayor of Kingstown worth your time? Judging from the small sample size provided for review, no. Thus far, the series doesn’t have anything to say that hasn’t been said before – and better – by past shows. If you’re looking for a series about the deep-seeded issue of systemic racism and institutional blindness to its roots, The Wire does all that Kingstown is trying to say so much better – and even if you’ve already watched it, why not watch it again? In fact, Aidan Gillen, one of the stars of The Wire and Littlefinger on Game of Thrones, appears in Kingstown, so watching The Wire again will at least give you a chance to see one of the Kingstown stars in a much better role. It’s possible that Kingstown can course correct later in its first season – pilots, after all, are notoriously tricky – but I’m not holding my breath.

Mayor of Kingstown premieres on Sunday, November 14 on Paramount+ with its first two episodes. Those first two episodes were provided for review.