Posted in: CBS, Opinion, streaming, TV, TV | Tagged: hugh dillon, jeremy renner, Mayor of Kingstown, paramount, taylor sheridan, yellowstone

Mayor of Kingstown: Macho Noir Destined to Be Dad's Favorite New Show

Paramount+'s Mayor of Kingstown is a macho noir crime series from Taylor Sheridan, whose Yellowstone is currently the most-watched show in the US with 14 million viewers, so he's now serious business. Where Yellowstone is a Western soap opera on steroids, Mayor of Kingstown is a crime noir soap about wounded masculinity.

Jeremy Renner plays Mike McLusky, an ex-con and fixer with his brother Mitch (Kyle Chandler), who's the unofficial Mayor of Kingstown, a bleak, dying town whose main business is prisons, which employs most of the population. The rest of the town seems to be either in crime or inmates at those prisons. Mitch and Mike are intermediaries who make deals with the gangs, the cops, and both inmates and guards alike to keep the town from blowing up in endless violence. It's a noir universe that's almost Science Fiction, a town awash in corruption, systematic racism, and economic inequality. Mitch is the easygoing dealmaker who's everyone's friend, Mike is the enforcer who makes sure everyone plays nice and their kid brother Kyle (Taylor Handley) is a young cop who backs them up with a badge when they need it. Their embittered, disapproving mother Miriam (Dianne Wiest) teaches history to female inmates to help them get their high school diplomas.

Mayor of Kingstown is basically Hawkeye for grumpy old men. No humour, no tights, all grim. Jeremy Renner gets to corner both ends of the genre market this Autumn with both shows: playing a superhero for the boys and a noir antihero for their dads. He carries the show as a wounded knight in tarnished armour, trapped in a world he hates but can't leave. Mike is the kind of enigmatic figure whose unpredictability is designed to keep viewers hooked, intrigued by his mystery & wondering what he's going to do next. He'll counsel the grieving family of a death-row inmate on the day of execution while also giving advice to the family of the inmate's victim in the same room. He'll beat up gangsters who threaten the balance of peace, yet sit down for a beer with them later. He'll throw himself into a police operation to trap a meth dealer that nearly gets him killed and doesn't bat an eyelash.

When he buys a bow and arrow to deal with a bear that's scavenging around his cabin, it's obviously a jokey nod to Hawkeye. Instead of killing the bear, he decides instead to feed and befriend it despite the potential danger. It's so obvious a piece of heavy-handed pulp metaphor for Mike's lot in life that it's almost hilarious in its audacity. Mike is doomed – feds, gangsters, and power players are circling like vultures, waiting for the right moment to bring him down. He's resigned to a life that will kill him one day, staying out of duty and fatalism.

The Male Gaze is awash in Mayor of Kingstown – the show is loaded with strippers, women in lingerie, breasts framed in leery angles – in a way that is so old-fashioned it's almost "quaint" in an off way. As of the first two episodes, there are no LGBTQ people around beyond a passing transphobic remark, which is a big clue that this show is for dads and men who want "Manly Entertainment." There's clearly a hunger for Crime Noir shows like this: soap operas for dads.

Mayor of Kingstown is now streaming on Paramount+.

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