Foto credits: Paramount+ / SkyShowtime
‘Unofficial power brokers’, that’s what the makers of Mayor of Kingstown Mike McLusky (Jeremy Renner) and his henchmen. Last season it was already shown that Mike is not the real mayor of the imaginary town in Michigan, but he is the man who ensures that the prison system that almost everyone earns from continues to run. Mike failed to complete that mission. The season ended with a gigantic carnage. Dozens of prison guards were murdered and the remains of hundreds of inmates riddled with bullets by the National Guard came into focus. As if showrunner Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone; 1923) said to the viewer: my show is not for the look-alike.
In the second season, Sheridan and co-screenwriter Hugh Dillon (who also plays the not undeserving role of detective Ian Ferguson) show what it looks like when the hierarchy within a crime system falls away. Within the four walls of the prisons in Kingstown, it is determined who deals in what. But as many leaders have fallen, inside and outside the walls in Kingstown, it has degenerated into chaos of every man for himself. Drug dealers raid other drug dealers; there is plenty of killing. And the prison guards who survived the ordeal are out for revenge. Meanwhile, last season’s biggest bad guy, Milo (Aidan Gillen), turns out to have fled during the riot.
That’s not convenient: Mike tries to keep Milo’s former employee Iris (Emma Laird) out of the hands of the Russian mafioso. In the second season, she is given the opportunity to enter a witness protection program. However, she doesn’t want that. Sheridan and Dillon have another surprise in store for her that fits perfectly with the fatalism that the two once again present to the viewer from the first minute. Sheridan’s series revolve, among other things, about the moral bankruptcy of the United States. And in Mayor of Kingstown characters who express hope are scarce. One is either bad or half-bad.
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The result is pure anti-hero television. Filmed in a place where the traders in power are either invisible or trapped within four walls.
