'Mayor of Kingstown' Is the Bleakest Dad Show Ever Made

Sheridanverse #1

Before I get started this week, I just want to thank you for reading. I’ve been doing Dad Shows for three months now, and it’s been fun and rewarding to build something of my own, and I’m grateful that you’re here with me. I am a few subscribers short of a small milestone that would be really cool to hit on my 90-day anniversary. So I will ask directly — if you’re enjoying Dad Shows, this week, please share it with one person you think would get a kick out of it. Maybe your dad? 

This is the first installment of Sheridanverse, an occasional sub-blog about the filmography of Taylor Sheridan, one of the patron saints of Dad Shows. There’s no schedule for it and I don’t imagine it being much different than usual Dad Shows entries, but it’s fun to call it Sheridanverse and to pay meaningful critical attention to Taylor Sheridan, who, as the creator of Yellowstone and an empire of Paramount+ shows, is the most important TV producer of the past decade and doesn’t get a lot of credit for it. 

Sheridanverse #1 is about Mayor of Kingstown, the second show Taylor Sheridan created, which premiered in 2021. Currently in its third season on Paramount+, MoK is set in a fictional Rust Belt town in Michigan. Deindustrialization has economically devastated Kingstown. And like many other places in America, the business that filled manufacturing’s void is incarceration. Kingstown is a company town for private prisons. Many of the people who live in Kingstown either work in the prisons or moved there to be near someone incarcerated in them. 

Kingstown is a complex ecosystem where things that happen inside the prisons affect what happens outside, and vice versa. And there is one man whose job it is to try to maintain equilibrium: Mike McClusky, the unofficial mayor of Kingstown, played by Jeremy Renner. 

McClusky is a fixer who works with everybody — the police, the department of corrections, the gangs, the DA’s office, and the citizens of Kingstown trying to navigate the morass. His job is to know stuff and backchannel and try to keep all the bad things that happen from getting worse. Because there are always bad things happening. 

Mayor of Kingstown is unflinchingly, unrelentingly bleak. It’s hard to call it entertainment, because it’s extremely not fun to watch. The show’s second episode features a stomach-turning, drawn-out death row execution that seems like it must be an accurate depiction of what death by lethal injection actually looks like. The third episode features a meth cook accidentally blowing up his trailer and killing his girlfriend’s five-year-old son, whose charred body is seen for long enough to make you wish you never saw it. The most recent episode of Season 3 opens with a homeless man finding a living baby and his murdered mother in a rat-infested dumpster. Why would anyone watch this? Why do I watch this? 

That’s not a rhetorical question; I can tell you why I watch it. I respect the craft of Mayor of Kingstown’s commitment to the dark side. Just when you think it can’t get any worse, the show finds a new way to kick your knees out. Honestly, I think it’s funny the way the writers are able to come up with the most fucked-up shit every week. I imagine the Mayor of Kingstown writers’ room is like the Riverdale writers’ room, only instead of coming up with insane twists they’re sitting around thinking about what would be the bleakest possible thing to have happen next. “What if instead of killing the snitch himself, he got a developmentally disabled serial killer to do it?” 

I mean, Mike’s voiceover that closes Season 2 genuinely made me laugh, because it’s just so much: 

It’s actually good writing, though. The credited writers on the episode from which this monologue comes are Regina Corrado, a veteran of Deadwood, one of the best-written shows of all time, and Dave Erickson, the creator of Fear the Walking Dead, which for a time had some of the best writing of any Walking Dead show. (Mayor of Kingstown’s relentless bleakness reminds me more of The Walking Dead than any crime drama it can be compared to.) (Corrado and Erickson also both wrote for Sons of Anarchy, which Sheridan acted on and transitioned to writing from, so it’s a full-circle thing for them.) With evocative language, this soliloquy concisely captures the mood and themes of the show. 

Sheridan’s shows have a reputation for being conservative, but this is unfair and not really correct. I mean, that speech is practically Marxist. Mayor of Kingstown is an anti-private prison, anti-death penalty show about how capitalism will always find a market to exploit, and in this case that market is human misery. 

Father of Dadstown

Mayor of Kingstown is the least-watched of Sheridan’s shows. That’s understandable, considering how unpleasant it is. It doesn’t have the romanticism or the swagger of the Yellowstone shows. Its darkness and cynicism make it a lot more like Sicario, his breakout screenplay. The lore is that the Mayor of Kingstown pilot is the first thing Sheridan ever wrote, and after the success of Yellowstone, Paramount came to him like “What else you got?” and he pulled it out of the proverbial drawer. He created it with actor-writer-producer Hugh Dillon, who plays homicide detective Ian Ferguson, but it’s Sheridan’s show — ot at least it was. As his portfolio of shows has gotten bigger, his day-to-day involvement in Mayor of Kingstown has declined. He wrote every episode of Season 1, but none in Season 3. Dillon, Erickson, and Corrado are capable hands, though. 

The show is perhaps currently best known among people who don’t watch it as the first thing Jeremy Renner worked on after his near-fatal snowplow accident on New Year’s Day 2023. In Season 3, the first since the accident, you’d never be able to tell that he had to learn how to walk again. He’s doing fight scene stunts and kicking ass. It’s cool. 

Obviously, Jeremy Renner is a Dad Actor. He’s one of the last actors to come from a blue-collar background, and he didn’t find success until his late 30s. He’s a grinder. He flips houses and lives in Nevada and has clearly had ups and downs in life. His image has been described as “like if a normal guy who works at Dick’s Sporting Goods was granted many wishes by god.” He seems like a regular dude, but in the way that regular dudes are kind of weird. He seems like a guy that if you met him at Home Depot or wherever would tell you his life story and philosophy within two minutes of meeting him. This is a good thing. Dad Shows is pro-that type of guy. 

And there are few guys who are more “Bad Guy Who Is Also a Cool Guy” than Mike McClusky. He always handles his business and looks out for his people. If you’re not his people, he will fuck you up. He has a gravelly voice. His only friend is the leader of the local Crip set. If Kingstown was a real place, Mike McClusky would single-handedly be responsible for it having one of the highest per capita murder rates in America.