Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mayor Of Kingstown’ On Paramount+, Where Jeremy Renner Plays A Reluctant Liaison In A Town Full Of Prisons

It seems that Jeremy Renner has hit the “starring in high-profile streaming series” phase of his career. Not only is he starring in the latest Marvel Studios series, Hawkeye, but he is the centerpiece of the new Paramount+ series Mayor Of Kingstown. Does he actually play the mayor? No, but considering the town’s major industry is for-profit prisons, he may as well be. Read on for more.

MAYOR OF KINGSTOWN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A kid hits a tennis ball in a grassy area. A man in a suit catches the ball, give the kid another ball, and offers him some money to hit that ball over the prison wall that’s behind him.

The Gist: That tennis ball is ignored by guards and given to a particular inmate who opens it up and takes the drugs that are inside. Mike McLusky (Jeremy Renner) talks in voice over about how Kingstown, Michigan has seven prisons in a 10-mile radius, and his job is to be the conduit between the prisoners and the outside world, a job he never really wanted to do in the first place.

Two days earlier, Mike and his brother/business partner Mitch (Kyle Chandler) are talking to a client. Mitch is the driver of this liaison business; he has so many connections in the prisons and in law enforcement, most people call him “The Mayor” — even the actual mayor calls him that. One of their connections is their younger brother Kyle (Taylor Handley), who’s a Kingstown PD detective.

Vera Sunter (Elizaveta Neretin), the wife of Milo Sunter, an important client of the McLuskys who’s currently in prison, comes in; she tells Mitch that Milo wants him to retrieve a bag of money he buried in the woods after “that thing,” a robbery that Mitch knows about. She even has a map, which she tells him to make a copy of.

Meanwhile, Mike is meeting with two COs that he works with; one of them has a nephew who just started on the job and is already in the pocket of a gang member inmate. Mike says he’ll intercept a letter that the nephew says he’ll deliver, but a tennis ball of contraband has to go over the wall, and he asks the COs to ensure that everyone there knows what’s coming and won’t interfere.

In the women’s prison, Miriam McLusky (Dianne Wiest) is teaching a history class to the inmates. After class, one asks her if the Mayor can help her out, and Miriam, disgusted by what her sons do, tells her in no uncertain terms to never ask her that again.

Kyle provides police cover for Mitch and Mike and helps Mike dig up the bag with the money. But, at the same time, someone who was in the brothers’ office when Vera came around encounters her at the strip club where she works. All hell breaks loose after he follows her home, strangles her, and finds the map she was holding. At the same time, the plan to protect the young CO goes sideways when the kid beats the snot out of the inmate, sending him to the hospital and angering Bunny (Tobi Bamtefa), the head of the local Crips, with whom Mitch and Mike had a deal.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Mayor of Kingston feels like The Wire crossed with Mare Of Easttown, only more depressing (really).

Our Take: Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone) and Hugh Dillon (who plays Ian, a top KPD detective loyal to the McLuskys) created Mayor Of Kingstown, and the series starts off as a bit of a confusing mess. Renner, whose usual acting prowess is more apparent in the first episode’s later scenes, after he finds out what happened to Mitch, mumbles his way through the initial scenes, which is full of code words and poorly contextualized jargon.

When Mitch and Mike negotiate with the gang leader, for instance, they talk about a “FedEx.” we know it’s not really a package, and after some doing, we realized it was the name for the tennis balls filled with drugs that they launch over the prison wall. But everyone is talking so fast and so mumbly that it’s hard to discern what’s what. To be honest, we still have no idea what was in the letter the young guard delivered, who has it, and why it needs to be retrieved.

We get that Sheridan wanted to use unstilted dialogue for these scenes, but there’s no context for a viewer to grab onto, and is either left highly confused or checked out. It’s also a bit confusing because in his initial voice over, Mike says “I’m the Mayor of Kingstown”, but it’s clear that Mitch is the Mayor as the episode goes along. You start to forget that the cold open took place two days after most of the action, which makes what happens to Mitch all the more surprising.

Despite fine performances from Renner (at least in the second half of the episode), Wiest and Chandler, the first episode of Mayor Of Kingstown is relentlessly depressing, more interested in breaking Succession’s record for “number of f-bombs per hour” than telling a tight story.

What Mitch and Mike do, where they get paid to make the lives of people who are imprisoned and the people who work at the various prisons a little less stressful, seems to be good fodder for a thrilling drama full of antiheroes. But after the first episode, it feels like we’re basically going to see Renner grimly going about his business, fight with his mother about it, and maybe even suck in his police detective brother. And we’ll likely hear more mumbling. That’s not our idea of an engrossing show.

Sex and Skin: Vera is topless at her job (of course, it’s at a strip club). She grinds the guy that saw her at the brothers’ office during a private dance, not knowing who he is.

Parting Shot: After retrieving a stack of money at his office, now a crime scene, Mike is approached by a woman who has someone in prison that needs the Mayor’s help. Kyle tries to pull Mike away, but Mike breathes in heavily and asks the woman what the person’s name is.

Sleeper Star: Because Dianne Wiest has done so much TV lately, people forget that she’s won two Oscars. She’s excellent in the scene where she tells Mike that he never should have stayed in Kingstown and worked with Mitch.

Most Pilot-y Line: Bunny yells to a peon, “Motherfucker, get me some cold frozen shit. I don’t care where from!” after an exchange about the difference between a snow-cone, a Slurpee and a Blizzard. It’s funny but seems tonally out of place on this show.

Our Call: SKIP IT. While Mayor Of Kingstown boasts fine performances, it’s confusing at times and incredibly depressing at others. If we wanted to watch a show that’s relentlessly grim, there are much better choices out there.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Mayor Of Kingstown On Paramount+