Although many critics didn’t care for the first season of Mayor of Kingstown, it seems like most of its viewers actually did, myself included. Sure, it was relentlessly bleak and bloody, but it had Taylor Sheridan’s crafty scripting and Jeremy Renner’s solid acting to boost its appeal. Jump forward a year and now there’s season two, with Renner back as our indomitable hero, Mike McClusky. Also returning is co-creator and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan… for two episodes, and then he bails. And, uh, his absence is kind of, very, extremely noticeable. Season two of Mayor of Kingstown devolves into something quite akin to its fictional prison city: a melting pot of pointless chaos.

Let’s begin with the good, which is primarily Renner’s performance and the first two episodes. Renner’s Mike McClusky is essentially the entire focus of season two, so it’s certainly nice that the leading man came to play. Renner is stellar, and even when the material failed him – nearly constantly – his performance held up. Episodes one and two are also fairly satisfying, which is likely attributable to Sheridan’s creative contributions. Episode two, which he wrote by himself, set up an juicy plotline for the season to follow. It involved certain characters being put in prison in order to re-establish a hierarchy among the four primary gangs. What a good idea, since it meant that new gangsters could be introduced to account for the ones lost in the first season’s bloodletting. There were so many intriguing threads for the subsequent screenwriters to follow here, so of course they did the obvious thing and completely ignored them.

After Sheridan leaves to go work on one of his five or six (thousand) other projects, Mayor of Kingstown season two devolves into a menagerie of nonsense. The best way I can describe the storytelling is like this: imagine a writing team that only meets on Zoom. Now imagine that they have just one week to write the last eight episodes, and there’s no time for revisions. That’s what season two feels like. If that were actually the case, then it’d certainly explain why Mike and Bunny (Tobi Bamtefa) have the same conversation like 15 times. The writers knew said conversation had to be had, but not whose responsibility it was to write it, so they all did. The lack of communication would also explain why a number of subplots are introduced but quickly forgotten, with some picked up further down the road, only to be abruptly concluded. I’m trying to be fair and chalk this up to insufficient interaction or even budgetary restrictions, but it’s quite possible that this writing team simply fumbled Sheridan’s proverbial ball.*

That said, the most egregious error the writers made wasn’t with how they handled the story; it was with how they handled the characters. Mike, Bunny, and Ian (Hugh Dillon) are mostly spared from this mishandling, but even they make mind-boggling decisions on occasion. Mainly, though, I’m talking about Kyle and Mariam McCluskey (Taylor Handley & Dianne Wiest), and especially Iris (Emma Laird). Kyle’s character is meant to be adrift after the prison battle that punctuated season one, but the writers take that to the extreme by giving him almost nothing to do. It’s pretty much the same for Mariam, who’s function is extremely limited now that she’s all cool with Mike and his way of life. Her usefulness to the series was always flimsy, but I liked how Sheridan utilized her in the first season as the “tell” to the camera’s “show”, as her lectures often provided context to what was occurring on-screen. That was then; now she’s just a meandering diversion to pad the runtime.**

Then there’s Iris, whose season one ordeal is one of the worst that I’ve ever seen a character subjected to in any television series. Surely, having seen that and Emma Laird’s palpable commitment to her performance, the writers would give her something redemptive and significant to do in season two, right? I think you already know the answer. This might seem hyperbolic, but I’ve never witnessed a better example of a writers’ room not knowing what to do with a character. It almost would’ve been better if she wasn’t in the season at all, and instead someone like Mike just said, “Oh, Iris? I sent her away to somewhere safe.” I would’ve hated that, but at least it wouldn’t have marred the whole series for me.***

I don’t want to be repetitive, so I’ll end this review here before I ramble on about specific subplots that go nowhere or how much I hated the entirety of episode eight.**** There’s really not that much more to say, other than that if you’re like me and you hold Mayor of Kingstown to a Taylor Sheridan-standard, then you’ll likely be utterly disappointed with how this season develops. Renner is still good, but he cannot carry this show by himself, and he cannot be the only character who receives any meaningful attention. And considering what happened to him this winter, along with the fact that Sheridan appears to be more concerned with other projects, perhaps it’d be best if both men no longer had this show on their docket. Like the inmates it cynically portrays, Mayor of Kingstown is probably beyond saving.

If I had to score it, I’d give season two of Mayor of Kingstown a 3/10.

Notes:

* I looked up the eight or nine writers that wrote or co-wrote teleplays for this season, and there’s a mix of experience and inexperience there. Mayor of Kingstown is overwhelmingly cold and gritty, so it requires a deft touch to wring emotion and entertainment out of it. It’s clear that some of these creatives aren’t quite deft enough.

** Even though Mariam and Kyle’s scenes often padded the runtime, those runtimes weren’t even that long. Most of season two’s episodes ran under 40 minutes, with one that ran under 35. This means that there was plenty of time for all of the supporting characters to have fleshed-out subplots. For some reason – budgetary, creative, time, etc. – they chose not to fill out these episodes. It’s quite frustrating.

*** [SPOILER] One of the major subplots this season follows Mike as he looks for Iris, whom he suspects returned to Milo (Aidan Gillen), or at least he considers that possibility. So, Mike sneaks into the Russian gang’s nightclub to look for her, but is forced to leave after getting captured and told she isn’t there. Later on, Kyle spots Iris at the same club when he goes looking for Milo, because duh. Let me get this straight: am I supposed to believe that Mike took the Russians at their word and ruled out the nightclub? Why would he do that? And why wouldn’t he send Kyle, whom he roped in on his Iris search, to stake out the club? This is just another example of something being poorly addressed, forgotten about, and then poorly readdressed in a later episode.

**** [SPOILER] Okay, it makes sense that Mike would go on a bender because he needs a break from all the chaos, but why does he pick episode eight to do so? Has he accomplished anything major recently and therefore earned his siesta? Not really. He just dips out because the plot needs him to in order to “amplify” the drama. I didn’t buy it, at all.