Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mayor of Kingstown’ Season 2 on Paramount+, Where Jeremy Renner Returns As A Brooding Fixer Between Cop And Criminal

Mayor of Kingstown returns to Paramount+ for its ten-episode sophomore season with everyone scrambling for status quo after the deadly prison riot that closed out season one. There’s no word yet about how star Jeremy Renner’s ongoing recovery from a snowplow accident will impact the series, but for now he’s returned as power broker Mike McLusky alongside Dianne Wiest, Taylor Handley, Emma Laird, Aidan Gillen, and Hugh Dillon, who also co-created Kingstown with Taylor Sheridan. 

MAYOR OF KINGSTOWN – SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: It’s a sunny day in Kingstown as Mike McLusky (Jeremy Renner) leads a blindfolded Iris (Emma Laird) down a dock and to a motor launch. In a voiceover, Mike says that the hardest thing to do is forget the scars life gave you, the scars that you gave others, to find a place to cherish the few memories worth keeping. 

The Gist: The second season of Mayor of Kingstown picks up in the immediate weeks after a prison riot that took the lives of hundreds of inmates and dozens of corrections officers, displaced the surviving inmates (incarceration is the biggest industry going in the decaying industrial burg of Kingstown, Michigan), transformed the women’s prison into a militarized fortress, and uncorked a power vacuum that has the exact same factions who just murdered each other still clambering for clarity and authority. Mike, the town’s ultimate fixer, not only rescued Iris from the Russian gang who originally brought her to town to seduce him; he also rescued her from the white supremacist gang its leader Milo (Aidan Gillen) sold her to. Kyle (Taylor Hundley), Mike’s police detective younger brother who was caught up in the riot, has left town and taken a job with the Michigan State Police. And Miriam (Dianne Wiest), the McLusky family matriarch, returns to the women’s prison where she teaches to find her classroom populated with stormtroopers in riot gear. Kingstown wasn’t a happy place before the riot. Now it just has more scars. 

The temporary prison facility, a tent city erected in an abandoned train yard, is somehow even more depressing than the actual prison. It’s also more lawless, with inmates beating on each other in full view of the guards. The top dogs of the various ethnic gangs were all killed in the riot, and the guards who weren’t murdered outright were tortured and sexually abused, so what’s left behind is only more discord. Kareem Moore (Michael Beach), the captain of the guards, masks his trauma and is reinstated to active duty, only to savagely beat three bound and shrouded inmates. Whoever rises to power within the Kingstown prison system, whether criminal or law, will have a lot of clean up to do. 

Kyle’s state police transfer was an act to reclaim his sanity, perhaps promote longevity, and provide more security for his wife Tracy (Nishi Munshi) and their infant son. But interdicting maple syrup smugglers on the Great Lakes isn’t fulfilling, and despite the destructive nature of Kingstown policing, he seems to miss the juice. And as for those streets, the power struggle inside the prison drives the violence outside of it. Bunny (Tobi Bamtefa), whose Crip set sells drugs in the Commons, can’t promise Mike that there won’t be more bloodshed. But if a broker like Mclusky, who operates in the gray area between the gangs, the street, the cops, and the courts, can’t find some new leadership within his networks, then the riot and its fallout were really only the beginning.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Whenever Sons of Anarchy visited prison, it was portrayed as a hellish place where human life is devalued by inmate and institutional authority alike, and that is exactly the vibe that permeates Mayor of Kingstown. Meanwhile, it’s another Kurt Sutter-created series, The Shield, that best corresponds with the brash, often extrajudicial actions of the cops on the street in Kingstown. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the series is yet another entry in the vast universe of media properties orbiting around co-creator and principal writer Taylor Sheridan.

Our Take: With Aidan Gillen’s Milo apparently on the loose – we saw more than the characters of Mayor of Kingstown did about his movements during the prison riot – Mike McLusky won’t have the relative barrier of the penitentiary to keep the ruthless Russian crime lord away from him. Iris doesn’t seem to think Mike or even the witness protection program can keep Milo away from her, so she’s sticking around to face what’s next. And the McLusky family group hug that offered a brief moment of familial truth and reconciliation at the end of last season has only seemed to make Miriam more adamant about finally effecting change in Kingstown’s toxic culture of violence. After all of the death and destruction it has brought to bear, in season two Mayor of Kingstown feels just as touch and go as it did before, with each one of its characters trying to find stability while understanding the futility of that in a town that thrives on inequality and the awful certainty of more violence. After all, the stability they seek would only return this place to its tenuous and largely untenable existence.

With Mayor of Kingstown, it’s clear that grimness isn’t going anywhere. It’s therefore quite fortunate that the acting here is consistently first-rate, as illustrated by its many one-on-one moments between the characters caught up in all of this awfulness. Jeremy Renner found his groove as Mike McLusky midway through last season, and hasn’t let up; the fraught, often funny conversations between him and Tobi Bamtefa’s Bunny are a highlight of the show. Dianne Wiest and Michael Beach (Beach does double duty in Taylor Sheridan’s world, also appearing in Tulsa King), as well as Hugh Dillon and Derek Webster as Kingstown PD detectives, all help expand their characters’ personalities in these smaller moments, as does Necar Zadegan as Evelyn Foley, the city’s district attorney and Mike’s occasional paramour. And while his appearances have been brief, Aidan Gillen brings a wonderfully sinister menace to his work as Milo. Mayor of Kingstown is not feelgood television. But it never claimed to be, and seems to be doubling down on its sour times in season two. It’s to our benefit that the acting is so terrific, since otherwise Kingstown puts viewers on a collision course to bad mood city.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode, but sex workers and strip clubs have been known to figure into the plotting on Kingstown.

Parting Shot: Mike is troubled by the news that Milo may have/totally did escape custody during the chaos of the riot. And when Iris shows up at his office after walking out on her FBI protection detail, he’s not even surprised. “I try not to listen to my heart,” he tells her, both of them already wary of what the fugitive crime boss has in store for them. “But it tells me it’s true.”

Sleeper Star: Tobi Bamtefa (The Witcher) continues his stellar work here as Deverin “Bunny” Washington, the drug-dealing leader of the Crips who is Mike’s confidant, conscience, collaborator, and even something resembling a best friend, if there was ever a time for even an ounce of happiness to work its way into the harsh Kingstown ether. 

Most Pilot-y Line: “Will you just listen to me? Fuck!” Mike’s tenuous position as a broker between the criminal factions and law enforcement is no more solid than it was last season, and has taken a serious organizational hit in the wake of the prison riot. “We need a pecking order inside, so we have control on the outside. I have no one to negotiate with. There’s no fucking order.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. The grim goings-on and generally sour worldview that Mayor of Kingstown established with its first season have not abated with the arrival of its second. But nor has the fine acting and character work that exists in its many one-on-one moments. 

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges