Posted in: Opinion, Paramount+, TV, TV | Tagged: jeremy renner, Mayor of Kingstown, paramount, taylor sheridan

Mayor of Kingstown Season 3 Suffered From Not Enough Taylor Sheridan

Mayor of Kingstown Season 3 suffered from a major decline in the overall writing, with Taylor Sheridan's absence in the scripts strongly felt.

Let's get this out of the way – the third season of Mayor of Kingstown, which just aired its finale, was pretty terrible. There's no two ways about it. This is the season of a series where many of the things that made it good in the first seasons are no longer there, and it becomes a ghost of its former self despite still looking like the show with the same visual style and actors. And the decline in story quality has nothing to do with star Jeremy Renner's recovery from his grievous real-life injuries. He's as good as ever. It's the writing that has deteriorated.

To wit: Renner plays Mike McClusky, the unofficial Mayor of Kingstown, an underworld fixer who mediates between the cops and the various criminal gangs to keep the peace. It's funny that the actual, officially-elected mayor of Kingstown never appears in the show. There isn't even an actor cast to play him in three seasons. Mike is the "real" mayor who keeps the city going. The series is a crime noir fantasy about how the real power in a city lies between the criminal gangs and the police who vie for control of the streets, and the police are, in the end, no more than another gang, only with badges and official sanction. Mike McClusky plays chess master, constantly weighing up who gets to live or die to prevent more deaths on the streets and to prevent an all-out war between the cops and the gangs. The first two seasons had co-creator Taylor Sheridan's hand in the scripts with his tense, terse dialogue and unpredictable plotting held the audience's attention. Sheridan has stepped back from the series to deal with the turmoil of trying to land the final season of Yellowstone, planning its upcoming sequel series, steering the direction of Tulsa King, planning season two of Yellowstone prequel 1923, and creating Landsman, so his absence is strongly felt in the third season of Mayor of Kingstown.

A Watered Down "Mayor of Kingstown"

Season 3 of Mayor of Kingstown is where the series has started to slip without a surer hand on the plotting and the characters. A series always reaches the point later in its run where the characters start to talk about their feelings in a more on-the-nose way when emotions that previously worked best as subtext driving the story suddenly get spoken out loud. Where Sheridan's scripts and plotting previously held sentimentality at bay, that comes pouring out this season, and the show suffers for it. It also goes slack in its plotting and sets up easy, lazy – and grim – plots where the characters are kind of dumb in order for the plots to resolve themselves. For the first time in the series, Mike comes off as not being very good at his job or foreseeing what's coming and being able to plan for it. He's just reacting to the next horrible mess that pops up and blindsides him and everyone.

Other characters also suddenly become less smart than they were before in the first two seasons. Mike's sister-in-law Traci (Nishi Munshi) gets a plotline of her own after spending two whole seasons pregnant and fretting, but it's obvious, and she acts like she's completely unfamiliar with what happens in prisons. Really? Robert Sawyer (Hamish Allan-Headley) has gone from the sardonic, drily funny, and gleefully murderous SWAT ally of the first two seasons to a clichéd, paranoid killer cop in season three. Mike's brother Kyle (Taylor Handley) is even more mopey than ever. And why do we need Mike saying out loud his need for redemption and forgiveness when that's been the subtext of his entire character from the first season and Renner always played that implicit desire brilliantly? A show has lost its way when the characters constantly tell each other (and the viewer) what the other characters are to them.

Obvious, Unsurprising Character Deaths

There are three major characters who die in the finale of Mayor of Kingstown; two of them are suicides, and they are completely unsurprising and uninspired. The third is a major villain who has been the one Mike dreaded most from the first season. They were dumb deaths. These are the types of deaths that scriptwriters put in when they don't know anything else to do with characters or how else to resolve their storylines… unless the actors playing them asked to leave so they could go to work on another project. The characters were in a hopeless situation, so they just decided to die – that is lazy writing with no real effort to find a less expected or clichéd path. You could say that Milo (Aiden Gillen) had gotten desperate since his faked death at the end of season two and needed to get his money and power back, but is he really stupid enough to underestimate Mike like that, to torment Mike and Iris (Emma Laird) and expect Mike to still play ball with him? Did he not think Mike would bring backup when he did, and everyone always shows up to a major confrontation with backup? That's just plain lazy writing. Mike takes him out in a ridiculously easy way, considering how hard it was to touch him in seasons one and two.

Bunny Washington Goes Dumb

It's obvious that Taylor Sheridan didn't write any of season three of Mayor of Kingstown, even though he helped plot some of it. That's not the same as actually writing it or coming up with the plot itself. Take the climactic shootout on the bridge between Bunny Washington's gang and Konstantin's Russian gunmen. Mike and Bunny's plan was to completely wipe out the Russians and for Bunny to rule the streets at last and keep the peace in Kingstown. They expected to sacrifice some of Bunny's men, but why would the men or Bunny be stupid enough to start the shootout on a crowded bridge full of civilians? Bunny had been as Machiavellian as Mike since season one and has kept his patch by not endangering civilians. Why would he let this happen knowing that SWAT would descend on the bridge, take out all the shooters, and turn him into Public Enemy No. 1? Bunny has not been this stupid for more than two seasons, so why suddenly go full-on Dumb at the season finale? It boggles the mind when you stop and think about it. And it's lazy to just assume that criminals are dumb. The ones who survive and thrive the longest are not. You could argue that Bunny is getting arrogant and hubristic, but again, it's too easy to make that assumption.

The Pressures of TV Writing

At the end of the day, writing a series for television is hard. The writers are always under enormous pressure to write the episodes and have to change them in order to bring the production in on schedule and on budget. It's not uncommon for writers to cut corners and write dumb just to get through the season and hope the series gets renewed so they still have a job. However, Mayor of Kingstown is the latest example of when the ball starts to get dropped in the writing department when a series makes it past the first season. Season three has become more soapy than before, and not in a good way, but a series becoming more soapy has never been a good sign. Most shows wait till season four or five. Mayor of Kingstown just moved up that timeline.

Mayor of Kingstown is streaming on Paramount+.

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