In the season four premiere of Mayor of Kingstown, co-creators/writers Hugh Dillon and Taylor Sheridan waste no time smacking viewers with a sense of doom and gloom.
In the very first scene of the Paramount+ series’ return, viewers are introduced to a soft-voiced, world-traveled businessman from Detroit named Frank Moses (played by Fear of the Walking Dead star Lennie James). But within two minutes, viewers quickly surmise that the jazz-loving Moses is deadly.
Moses converses in the shadows of a railroad yard, discussing the history and metal properties of a penny he’s about to lay on a railroad track. The camera then shifts to show the coin is not alone on the train rail. Its companions are four Russian mobsters — stragglers from the previous season — laying on their stomachs with their necks outstretched over the rail. The faint clanking and horn blowing of a locomotive engine grows louder and beckons Moses and his crew to step back as the train reveals itself. The massive weight of the locomotive flattens the penny and leaves four decapitated bodies in the aftermath.
Moses hopes the killing of the remaining Russians in Kingstown will be seen as an olive branch and introduction gift to fostering a new partnership with long-time Crips gang leader, “Bunny” Washington (Tobi Bamtefa), so he will be granted a sit-down meeting with the mayor of Kingstown himself — Mike McLusky, played by star Jeremy Renner.
McLusky, however, isn’t interested in meeting new gangsters or unknown criminals in his town. He’s zeroed in on having a conviction thrown out that is about to send his baby brother, Kyle McLusky (Taylor Handley), to prison for six months for intentionally wounding a police officer in the finale of season three. (As a reminder, the rogue officer was about to shoot an innocent Black man and his young son while stuck in their car on a Kingstown bridge due to a bloody gun battle between Crips and Russian mobsters.)
In the premiere, Kyle takes a six-month plea deal and decides not to tell the truth about what really happened on the bridge that night. Doing so might cost the officer who Kyle shot to expose the many misdeeds of the Kingstown Police Department, if Mike can’t effectively get State Attorney, and former lover, Evelyn Foley (Necar Zadegan) to drop the charges against his brother. He knows he must focus all his resources in making sure Kyle – a known cop in Kingstown – survives those few months in prison. By the end of the premiere, viewers see that Kyle’s protection, however, may not be going all that well.
Renner tells The Hollywood Reporter that keeping McLusky’s baby brother alive is clearly the main driving storyline for the new season.
“Some of the biggest obstacles are in Mike’s way,” Renner says. “It’s like one note in a lot of ways, the drive of: All I have to do is protect my brother. And there’s a lot of things on the outside of that, which I think draws in the narrative of a lot of the show’s characters, around this main narrative.”
Mike is a focused man, but Bunny, eating up the dream that Moses is selling to him about keeping his criminal enterprise while making the books look like legitimate businesses, and a deadly Columbian Cartel trying to move in and take over the Russians spot, are all serving as new distractions.
And he also has a new formidable foe — none other than the one played by Edie Falco.
Falco is introduced to the world Kingstown as Nina Hobbs, the new warden running the prison where Kyle will be sent to. Mike wants a partnership with Hobbs that is clearly self-serving, to protect his brother. Hobbs, on the other hand, says it is her show and the prison will be running how she sees fit, with no outside influences.
Falco told THR that she initially hadn’t seen one episode of Mayor of Kingstown, but it didn’t take her long to want to be a part of the show.
“Then I started watching it, once it came across my desk,” Falco says. “There’s so much good storytelling and so much good acting. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the whole kit and caboodle for me when it comes to wanting to work on something. And it’s mostly about the actors, because I will spend my time working opposite someone, and if they want to get on playground as much as I do, then it’s nothing but fun.”
But who exactly is Hobbs?
“She’s a woman who’s been doing this job for as long as she can remember,” Falco explains about her new character. “She’s very good at it, and perhaps takes pride in that fact, but she knows she will always work, and then it is on to her next job. She’s showing up to do what she does — to straighten out a messy situation. In the beginning, she’s trying to feel out, ‘Who’s gonna be my biggest problem. Who can I lean on?’ She’s there to do a job she’s done many times before.”
As for Renner, the physical demands of the aliments and intense action involved while filming Mayor of Kingstown were much more bearable in filming season four than the previous one. (Renner came back to the show about a year after suffering from a near-fatal snowplow accident in 2023.)
“It’s a lot less sort of hospice feeling compared to season three,” Renner says of his delicate condition while filming the previous season following his injury and recovery. “I was pretty fragile in the beginning of season three. But having some more time to heal, season four was a lot more fun. You can have some more personality, and there’s a little bit more of being awake for it, and having more energy.”
Dillon tells The Hollywood Reporter he feels Renner has given his best performance out of the four seasons of portraying Mike McLusky.
“I remember talking to you last time,” Dillon tells me,” and I wasn’t speculating because by the time I hung up the phone, I said, ‘I wish I had told him about this ending I had, because I had the ending for season four.’ This whole season is built on unpredictability, and that’s what I wanted to see. I didn’t want some, ‘Oh, yeah, and then this happens.’
“You could put all those scripts into ChatGPT, and it would not spit out what we’re doing this year. And that’s what’s different about this show. That’s how we roll. That is what Taylor Sheridan taught me. And then on top of it, Renner is on top of his game, and so is Edie Falco. We found this great cast, and we’ve also got Laura [Benanti], and she just rolled in and killed it.”
Benanti plays newbie prison guard Cindy Stephens, a single mother of three who Dillon calls a “moral observer.” Benanti tells THR those are just some of the attributes that drew her to the show.
“This character is so unlike anyone I’ve ever played,” Benanti explains.“I do a lot of comedy, which I love. And I feel like stretching oneself as an artist keeps you facile and keeps things really interesting. The writing is also so beautiful on this show, and the acting is so fantastic. When I got the sides for this audition — because they made me audition, rude! (laughs) — I was so moved by her stoicism; I never, ever get to do that. So the restraint that it took for multiple episodes to, as Dillon so eloquently put it, be the moral observer of this show was unlike anything I have been asked to do.”
Renner says fans will have a lot to digest this this season, as the actors did as well.
“It’s a very complicated show,” Renner says. “Even four episodes in, there is a lot that goes on, man. It’s pretty intense. And because there’s a lot going on and it’s a complicated season I, like Edie, just focused on every scene. You get all the scripts, but it’s too much information that I felt I shouldn’t be privy to. I think it over complicates it. We really had to focus on the task at hand, the scene at hand.”
If fans of the show found the first episode suspenseful, unpredictable and brutally dark, Renner says they are in for more of that in the remaining nine episodes.
“Buckle up! Because it ramps up,” Renner warns. “There are a lot of shockers in this one.”
Falco adds, “And probably what you think is going to happen is not going happen. As I was reading the scripts, I was like, ‘Are you kidding me!’”
Mayor of Kingstown releases new episodes Sundays on Paramount+.
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