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Taylor Sheridan‘s Mayor of Kingstown, the Jeremy Renner-starring series, has never been better. Its exciting fourth season sees protagonist Mike McClusky (Renner) attempt to keep the peace as two dangerous new factions make serious moves within Kingstown’s borders. As if this wasn’t tense enough, a new warden challenges Mike’s authority within prison walls, while a longtime enemy makes simultaneous moves on Mike’s family within said walls. The longtime popular series is making major waves at Paramount+, and has for quite some time. Among the series’ considerable fan base is a legendary horror author who is no stranger to tense stories full of dangerous antagonists: Stephen King himself.
As much as Stephen King is associated with the writing game, he’s long been connected to the cinematic arts, even beyond the massive slate of adaptations of his literary works. King’s has written movie scripts, directed a feature film, and has never shied away from giving his thoughts on the above-mentioned adaptations. It’s an established fact, for example, that he loved Frank Darabont‘s change to the ending of The Mist, and infamously hated Stanley Kubrick‘s changes to The Shining. He’s also written stories outside the horror canon, featuring detectives, time travelers, prisoners, soldiers, and more. You can tack one more of King’s opinions onto the list, since the verdict is in: the King loves Kingstown.
Mayor of Kingstown? More Like Stephen King’s Town
Back in July of 2024, King was clearly in the thick of a Mayor of Kingstown watch that sent the opinionated icon straight to his Twitter feed. “I have no f***ing clue what’s going on in THE MAYOR OF KINGSTOWN, but I love this show,” King said (in a now-deleted tweet chronicled at Deadline). He continued to say (albeit in an uncensored way) that “It reminds me of THE SHIELD and SONS OF ANARCHY. I had no f*cking idea what was going on in those, either.” King praised Mike McClusky’s choice of automobile, noting “What I know is Mike Mclusky drives around in a badass Lincoln Connie. That’s all I need to know. Also, that guy Bunny [Tobi Bamtefa] is a badass.”
It’s certainly a bit difficult to pinpoint exactly what Kingstown plot lines have surprised (or pleasantly confused?) The King. With the timing of the tweets, if he was watching the series’ third season, he’d have been about midway through it. Season 3 sees the relative balance in Kingstown disrupted when a Russian gang, led by Konstantine (Yorick van Wageningen), emerges simultaneously to Bunny Washington (Tobi Bamtefa), preparing his own power play. In Episode 4, “Rag Doll,” Mike surprisingly shoves a white supremacist gangster off a roof when the latter reminds Mike how he survived prison by joining a white supremacist gang, led by Merle (an eerie and excellent Richard Brake). Episode 6, “Ecotone” takes the other factions’ war against Bunny to a very personal level, killing Bunny’s cousin Rhonda (Nona Parker Johnson), off in a heartbreaking cold open one episode after she had her best and most extensive showcase yet. No one’s ever safe in the Mayor of Kingstown, and between that and an ever-shifting power balance, there’s no shortage of twists for fans like King.
King Also Praised Jeremy Renner’s Series Continuation After His Dangerous Accident
A tense series of twists, with lovely characters being decidedly unsafe, made for a tense and surprising third season (I can only imagine King’s surprise when ruthless Russian mobster Milo (Aidan Gillen), a Russian crime boss that Mike loathes, comes back from the dead at the end of Season 3). King’s Tweet-storm went on to mention star Jeremy Renner’s harrowing real-life snowplow crash, complimenting Renner’s return to the show despite his life-threatening accident, saying, “Also, Jeremy Renner is a badass who got run over by a snowplow and came back for Season F*cking Three!” In our own interview with Renner about returning to the show before his recovery was even complete, Renner said that his familiarity with the series was part of the reason for his return. He said:
Yeah, there’s no way I could have done it and dig into a new character and a new script, or if it was a movie. I require too much brain power to operate this body and recover. So, there was a comfortability in that. By the way, I still wasn’t ready. Even though my brain said, “You’re ready,” my body was like, “No, you’re not ready.” So, yeah, that helped. At some point, you have to pull the band-aid off and go fail, and then maybe you have to go back home and the whole thing falls apart, but you’ve gotta do it. The idea of doing fiction was so far [from my mind]. I almost didn’t go back because of that. I was like, “I can’t imagine learning these fake words and fake stories. For what? I’ve gotta worry about real life and my next step. I’m not gonna go do this. For what?” I had a come to Jesus with my career. I was like, “Maybe I just have to retire or quit. How absurd is it to go do fake stuff, just to entertain people? What a dummy! What have I been doing with my career?” But I found a way to overcome that, obviously, because we finished our season and I’m super excited about it.
It makes some sense that Stephen King has connected with a show like Mayor of Kingstown. Though known for his horror, King wrote the novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and the serial novel The Green Mile, both centered around dangers and injustices within prison walls. In fact, King loved the adaptation of The Shawshank Redemption, and both it and the adaptation of The Green Mile are regularly tagged as masterful films. His works also regularly feature well-intentioned protagonists attempting to hold back forces of destruction and chaos, something McClusky regularly attempts to do, and they almost invariably feature human villainy even when the supernatural is afoot. Even if King couldn’t fully pin down what’s happening in ye old Town of Kings, it certainly connects to more than a few of the themes that permeate his own work.
