Mayor of Kingstown Season-Premiere Recap: Heads You Lose

Welcome back to Kingstown, friends! Remember to wear a jacket, because it’s always cold and gray here. You might want to carry around some cigarettes and snacks, too, to pass along to your many friends and relatives who are no doubt either incarcerated in or employed by Kingstown Prison. Oh, and it would be helpful if you could remind us of your gang affiliation whenever you roll back into town. Russian Mafia? Aryan Brotherhood? Columbian? Crip? Cop? Some combination of the above?

As you may recall, the last time we were here, the city suffered a major bloodletting. By the end of Mayor Of Kingstown’s third season, we’d seen the deaths of the prison’s warden Kareem, the warring Russian mob bosses Konstantin and Milo, and the former prostitute Iris — the latter a pet reclamation project for Kingstown’s unofficial “mayor,” Mike McLusky (Jeremy Renner). The season also ended with Mike’s cop brother Kyle (Taylor Handley) being taken into custody by the ADA Evelyn Foley (Necar Zadegan), after he shot Robert Sawyer (Hamish Allan-Headley), a fellow officer notorious for turning violent against both criminals and civilians. A lot of bodies dropped last year. A lot of pieces were taken off the board.

So how does the show recover? First, by restocking the cast.

Mayor of Kingstown is the kind of show where any given episode is either thrillingly action-packed or muted and explanatory. The season-four premiere, “Coming ‘Round the Mountain,” is largely action-free, aside from a few brief eruptions of violence. The series’s head writer, Dave Erickson, is primarily concerned with introducing all the new faces, while also catching us up on what the old ones have been up to since the season-three finale.

The most high-profile newcomer would be Edie Falco, a four-time Lead Actress Emmy-winner. Falco plays Nina Hobbs, the prison’s new warden, a fervent Christian with a reputation for fixing “flawed institutions.” She makes it clear early and often that she doesn’t have much respect for the way things were done before she arrived. She doesn’t value Carney (Lane Garrison), the guards’ main liaison between the prisoners and Mike. Nor does she think she needs Mike to help her stay on top of Kingstown’s various rivalries.

Falco, unsurprisingly, makes a strong first impression as Hobbs, with her no-nonsense attitude and her casual religiosity. (When Carney tries to insist he has no lingering fealty to Kareem because you “can’t be loyal to a dead man,” Hobbs quickly replies, “Tell that to Jesus.”) And despite this episode’s generally slow pace, I do think it gets season four’s prison storylines off to a strong start.

To begin with, Raphael (D Smoke), back behind bars after escaping last season — and failing, during his time on the outside, to assassinate the legendary white supremacist shit-stirrer Merle Callahan (Richard Brake) — immediately starts beef with the Colombian gangs, who have taken over the prison’s drug trade and are dictating unfavorable terms to the Crips. It’s Hobbs’s first day, and trouble is already a-brewing.

But the more promising drama involves Kyle, who in this episode begins serving his time in prison for shooting Robert. The hoosegow isn’t the friendliest of places for ex-cops, even under normal circumstances, and even though Hobbs promises Mike that she will “protect Kyle like I do all my wards,” she’s made that task harder by relieving Carney of a lot of his responsibilities. Sure enough, on Kyle’s first day — while on the way to his cell for the first time — he’s beaten by a vengeful fellow prisoner. Then he gets stuck in a cell next to Merle, who advises him to keep his mouth shut and to refuse medical treatment.

Hobbs told Mike that “violence reduces like a sauce wherever I serve.” Given that chefs reduce sauces to intensify their flavor, it seems she’s right.

We don’t get an exact specification of how long has passed since season three, but at one point the KPD lieutenant Ian Ferguson (Hugh Dillon) says it’s been a month since he put Iris on a bus out of town, so let’s assume that’s roughly accurate. In that month(ish), with the Crips having been assigned by Mike to control most of the crime in the city, things have been, in the words of gang-lord Bunny Washington (Tobi Bamtefa), “pin-drop quiet.” Even when Mike drops by an Aryan cook-house, the white gang seems satisfied with the current dope-dealing arrangements, because “We got our corners, we’re making a dollar.”

Instead, the real trouble since we’ve been away has been on the law enforcement side. Kyle has been treated as a hero by his former police brothers because he refused to tell the media or the DA’s office anything about Robert, no matter how hard Evelyn has pressured him. None of this has sat well with Robert, who is currently off the force, lying low, and seething at both Kyle and Evelyn. Beefing to Ian about Kyle, Robert hisses, “He shoots me and I’m the fuckin’ bad guy?” As for Evelyn, Ian admits that she’s a problem Mike stubbornly refuses to solve, but that perhaps some unhinged vigilante lawman like Robert could handle. (“Just sayin’.”)

Mike’s not that happy with Evelyn either, even though she took it easy on Kyle, bumping his sentence down to what should amount to six months behind bars. Most of this episode deals with Kyle’s last day of freedom, before he reports to prison and promptly gets his ass kicked. While saying his goodbyes to the outside world, Kyle makes the kind of pledge to his wife Tracy (Nishi Munshi) that people should never make in crime shows: that as soon as he does his time, they’ll sell the house, leave Kingstown, and live happily ever after somewhere far, far away. Something tells me that future circumstances are going to complicate that plan.

Along those same lines, there’s a pointed moment between Mike and Kyle in which Mike gives him a hard-won piece of advice about serving time: “Do not become them to survive.” This runs counter to what their mother Mariam told Mike before he went away. She commanded him to do whatever he had to do to make it out alive — and then she never forgave him for who he became. I don’t know what Merle has planned for Kyle, but I don’t think the kid’s going to be able to spend the next six months cowering quietly in his cell.

There are two other new Mayor of Kingstown regulars introduced this week, neither of whom get a lot of screen-time, but both of whom are promising characters played by terrific actors. Laura Benanti plays Cindy Stephens, a new guard, about whom we only know two things so far: that she’s a loving mother to some very sweet kids, and that she’s going to be spending her days surrounded by some of the worst criminals in Kingstown (plus Kyle).

Then there’s Frank Moses, played by the great Lennie James. He kicks off this episode with a monologue about the composition and history of the penny, just before placing a coin on the railroad tracks, right next to the tied-up bodies of four Russian mobsters. A train roars through, severing the crooks’ heads — and then we don’t see Frank again. The episode does end, though, with an attack on Bunny’s motorcade from unknown assailants, possibly working for the Colombians … or for Frank.

Who is Frank? Mike describes him as “the devil we don’t know,” and Bunny suggests he’s “drawing eyes to draw eyes.” He’s new in town, and he’ll probably be here a while. I hope he packed some mittens.

Solitary Confinement

• Ian’s line about it being one month since he said goodbye to Iris comes in response to news about her overdose, which has just now reached the Kingstown Police Department offices. For now, Ian’s hesitating to tell Mike. I look forward to that moment when he does because — I have to admit — I take a perverse pleasure in the scenes where the man who thinks he controls Kingstown discovers that, once again, one of his master plans has flopped.

• Speaking of Mike and his fondness for saving lost souls, there’s an out-of-nowhere scene in this episode in which he finds a non-responsive woman sprawled out on the street. Nothing more comes of this. Something surely will.

• Once again, welcome back to our Mayor of Kingstown coverage! I find this show fascinating, both for the ways it follows the Taylor Sheridan model of TV storytelling — crawling along for weeks and then suddenly cranking the story into violent overdrive — but even more so for the way it diverges. The show’s co-creator, Hugh Dillon, and the current showrunner, Erickson, have shown an ability to tightly weave their storylines at times, in genuinely suspenseful, propulsive stretches that make it worth enduring the lulls. Here’s hoping for more of that in season four.