Taylor Sheridan solidifies himself as a Top 5 screenwriter in Hollywood with his latest.
Genre: 1 Hour TV Drama
Premise: In a small town surrounded by seven prisons, two brothers do everything in their power to keep an all-out war from erupting in the community.
About: Paramount looks to be building its Paramount + streaming service around one name – Taylor Sheridan. Sheridan, who already has a major hit at Paramount with Yellowstone, has two Yellowstone offshoots teed up and then this one, Mayor of Kingstown, with Jeremy Renner in the lead. Antoine Fuqua is executive producing and will likely direct the first episode.
Writer: Taylor Sheridan (story co-created by Hugh Dillon)
Details: 48 pages
No, for those wondering, this is NOT a sequel to the Mare of Easttown. At least I don’t think it is. Come to think of it, I have no idea. What if it is a sequel to the Mare of Easttown? I guess we’re going to find out.
We see a tennis ball launch over a fence and come to a stop. Two combat boots enter frame, hands emerge and pick the ball up, a man slices the ball open, retrieves $200. We pull back to see we’re in a prison. We pull back further still to see this prison sits next to another prison. And then another prison. There are seven prisons in total here, all of them nestled up against one small town.
We meet Mike and Mitch Mclusky. Mike is the muscle. Mitch is the brains. Together, they’re trying to keep this town together. You see, every single day there’s some kind of issue in one of the prisons. For example, maybe a white prisoner crossed a line with a black prisoner and now he’s a marked man. The white prisoner’s father will come to Mike and Mitch and plead that they do something to help his kid. Mitch, who’s known as the “mayor” of this town, even though he’s just the superintendent of these prisons, usually figures out a solution.
The story really picks up when Mike and Mitch are given a map by an old associate named Milo through an intermediary named Vera, a local stripper. Milo helped them out a long time ago so they have to do what he says. And right now, he’s buried 200,000 dollars for them to retrieve on the other side of town.
Mike and Mitch retrieve the money without any issues and Mitch throws it in his safe. Mind you, this is dirty money. Mike and Mitch are definitely on the take. And why wouldn’t they be? They’re keeping this town together!
Well, that night, a stringy gangbanger named Alberto gets a lap dance from Vera, who makes him feel like the biggest man in the world when he’s paying, but turns off the charm the second the dance is over. Furious, Alberto secretly follows her home, rapes her, kills her, then finds a copy of the map she gave Mitch.
Alberto traces the map back to Mitch (**spoilers coming**), shows up in his office, and demands that he give Alberto the money. Mitch, comfortable around crazy people, casually retrieves the money for Alberto, who then casually lifts his gun and shoots Mitch in the side of his head. Mitch is dead. He then cooly walks out with 200 grand.
Across town, Mike is attacked by a bunch of crips after one of the men Mike was protecting in prison disobeyed an order and attacked a crip. Mike is barely able to get out of the situation alive and storms back to town hall to yell at his brother for not giving him a heads up. Instead, he finds out his brother is dead. Mike will now have to decide if he wants to take his brother’s place as the NEW Mayor of Kingstown.
Whatever “it” is in regards to screenwriting, Taylor Sheridan has it.
I generally don’t enjoy super-serious stories about small towns. The stories tend to be too slow for my taste, too mundane. But Taylor Sheridan somehow is able to make the mundane captivating.
This was so good.
It started out sloppy though. We’re told by some father that his inmate kid is being taken advantage of. Can you do something, Mitch and Mike? One of the hardest things to do in screenwriting is talk about a character who the audience hasn’t met yet. We have no baseline for who this father is talking about because we’ve never met his son. It’s a wobbly way to begin.
Then this Vera woman shows up and starts talking about ANOTHER CHARACTER we haven’t met yet, some guy named Milo. If these characters are the ones involved in all the drama, why aren’t we meeting *them?* Why are secondary characters introducing them?
Then some crazy young drug addict is getting a lap dance. We’re talking to some local gangbanger to try and fix a problem. We’ve got two more dudes who need help with their kids in prison. It’s a cacophony of information without any context.
But the moment the second half rolls around, all these storylines start intersecting, and what was previously a golf cart putting along on its last ounce of fuel, becomes an Indy 500 race car that’s lapped everybody ten times over. I mean (**SPOILER**) when Alberto shoots Mitch, my jaw hit the floor. What the hell just happened!??? Mitch was the main character! From that moment on, Sheridan had me in the palm of his hand.
One of the things I was trying to figure out was what does Sheridan do differently? Because he’s not writing big splashy sci-fi stuff here. He doesn’t have cool set pieces. He doesn’t even have basic stuff, like car chases. Most of his stories are 2-3 people in a room talking. Like I noted yesterday, with Fast 9, people in a room talking is your enemy as a writer. So what is it that Sheridan does that others don’t?
All of his scenes seemed to be centered around a PROBLEM.
“I have a problem,” someone says. “My kid is stuck in prison and people are trying to kill him. Can you help me?” Rarely, in this pilot, is there a moment where characters are just exchanging information. Scenes die when there are no dramatic undertones. In a lot of those Fast 9 scenes of characters in a room talking, they would be explaining plot points, joking around with each other, or the mother of all writing no-no’s, recalling some event that happened in the past. There wasn’t any dramatic tension in the scenes.
Here, there always seemed to be a problem, which created an obvious desire to solve said problem, which gave the characters a goal, which gave the scene a point. Or, if there wasn’t a problem, there was an undercurrent of potential danger. For example, Vera dancing for Alberto was a scene that didn’t have a “problem.” But Sheridan highlights the anger and danger inside Alberto. We get the sense that he’s a volcano ready to blow. So the dance isn’t just a dance. It’s a prelude to something potentially terrible happening.
Scripts live or die on their scenes. So if you can come up with an operating procedure that ensures all your scenes are entertaining, you’re set. And Sheridan seems to have figured that mystery out.
Finally, there’s a subtle anti-woke approach to the writing here. Regardless of how you feel, politically, about the implementation of woke ideology into television and movies, one of the problems with it is that it’s made story points a lot more predictable. If there is a story point where either a ‘woke’ or ‘anti-woke’ development could happen, 99% of the time in 2021, the writer will choose the woke option.
Sheridan isn’t concerned about that. He just wants to tell a good story. That’s probably why I was surprised at some of things that happened in this pilot. My initial thought when they happened was, “Wait, you can’t do that! Can you??” And then I realized, I only thought you couldn’t do it because I’d gotten used to the last year’s worth of screenplays doing the exact opposite.
Mayor of Kingstown is top-grade writing. Even more impressive considering how busy Sheridan is. Check this one out!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: (**SPOILER**) I’m a newly converted fan of the “kill off your supposed lead character in the pilot* move. Not only does it make the pilot memorable. It creates major questions moving forward for the series. One of the hardest things to do in television is make someone want to read (or watch) your next episode. Something like this creates so much uncertainty moving forward that you practically have to watch the next episode.
