Mayor of Kingstown, season 2, review: brainless machismo and breathless misogyny

Mayor of Kingstown (Paramount+) is not to be confused with Mare of Easttown. Once you start watching them, the differences are obvious. Mare of Easttown had a capable woman in the lead role, played by the capable Kate Winslet. In Mayor of Kingstown, the women are strippers and hookers, incapable of doing anything without a man’s help.

This is macho TV, the calling card of show creator Taylor Sheridan, a former cowboy who has enjoyed enormous success in the US with Yellowstone. Jeremy Renner plays Mike McLusky, not a real mayor but so-called because he is the Mr Fix-It of a grim Michigan town dominated by seven prisons within a 10-mile radius. Renner (currently recovering from a terrible accident in which he was crushed by a snow plough) is in cool, tough guy mode, always suited, speaking in a low growl, as respected by the police as he is by the town’s gangsters. He has rescued the sweet-but-damaged prostitute sent to snare him in series one, because men like this are always saviours and protectors. If only Mike drove a Lamborghini, this would be a teenage boy’s fantasy.

The show is aiming for the dramatic heights of The Wire and The Shield but falls short. The performances are decent – particularly Taylor Handley as Mike’s police officer brother – and the plotting is assured. But it is undone by the violence for violence’s sake. Drug-dealing gangsters, prison guards, police – no matter who is on screen, they’re either shooting people in the head or beating them half to death. It is a show for viewers whose adrenaline pumps at the sight of a SWAT team.

You sense that the makers have brainstormed how to shock/titillate viewers further: in one scene, a gang ambushes a car then lets their pit bull jump in and maul the driver to death. The police come along and cut things short by pumping 15 bullets into the dog. Series one ended with a prison riot; in series two we learn that the inmates killed 33 guards and “raped the rest of them with their own billy clubs”, and are now housed in a makeshift camp where lawlessness reigns.

As for the women? Dianne Wiest, the only female character allowed to keep her clothes on, is coshed by a mugger. Things are going better for Mike’s prostitute pal when he installs her on a boat and – what are the chances? – she finds a string bikini in exactly her size.