Jeremy Renner’s Mayor of Kingstown reign is coming to a close. Was he impeached, or did the Taylor Sheridan Paramount+ show — the one that’s not Landman, Tulsa King, Lioness or Yellowstone spinoffs 1883 and 1923 — just reach its natural term limit? We’ve got a lot of questions following Monday’s season-five renewal, which came eight days after season four’s big finale.
In honor of the coming fifth and final season of Mayor of Kingstown, here are five questions swirling around our brains:
Why Is the Final Season Shorter?
One thing that jumped off the press release is that Mayor of Kingstown season five will consist of eight episodes; seasons one through four had 10 episodes apiece. Is the 20 percent reduction a punishment for Sheridan jumping ship to NBCUniversal? Is it the budgetary realities set forth by a new regime? (Sheridan’s shows are famously expensive to produce, and Taylor’s old Paramount handler Chris McCarthy never batted an eyelash — that’s probably why his wagon has been hitched to Sheridan’s new deal.) Is the shorter episodic order so Sheridan can focus on all his other Paramount Skydance deliverables? Or is it simply the proper number of episodes required to finish the story? The reality is that it’s probably some combination of all those things.
The Hollywood Reporter reached out to Paramount+, 101 Studios and Paramount Television with a request for comment on this story, but we did not receive a response.
Why End It Here?
Mayor of Kingstown season four was its best-received among critics, so it feels like a peculiar time to end things. But five seasons counts as a pretty good-sized run for an original streaming series. It also seems to be the upper limit for Paramount+, which has also closed out (or will close out) two of its successful Star Trek series, Discovery and Strange New Worlds, after five seasons. In fact, only one scripted Paramount+ original to date — The Good Fight, which began when the streamer was still known as CBS All Access — has lasted more than five seasons (it ran for six). Yellowstone also lasted five seasons on Paramount Network, though the circumstances of its ending were (to understate the situation wildly) a bit different.
Mayor of Kingstown also hasn’t drawn as big an audience as Sheridan’s other shows for Paramount+, based on Nielsen data (the streamer doesn’t regularly share its internal numbers). The show’s only time on the top 10 streaming charts came during 2024’s season three, and its viewing figures during five weeks then — where it averaged about 312 million minutes of watch time — are considerably smaller than those of the other series that carry Sheridan’s name.
Will This Cause a Domino Effect Among Sheridan Shows?
Does the end of Mayor of Kingstown spell the beginning of the end of Sheridan’s entire Paramount portfolio? The short answer is “probably not.” There was a time when it looked like Lioness might be a goner, but it seems to be going forward.
The on-the-record plan for Sheridan’s many ongoing, in-development, in-production and in-between seasons Paramount series is for them to, well, on-go. It makes sense for two reasons: 1) Taylor’s still got two years left on his Paramount TV deal (but his film agreement transfers to NBCU after March), and 2) These are Paramount productions — or at least co-productions — NBCU doesn’t get them just because it gets Sheridan. Given the monetary possibilities of the future-set TV deal, Sheridan will have up to a billion reasons to be as prolific at Universal as he’s been at Paramount.
When Sheridan rides off to greener (like money) pastures, any still-ongoing shows from his hand will remain with Paramount Skydance. How much Sheridan will personally be involved with them on a go-forward basis remains to be seen.
What’s Still Coming From the Sheridan-Verse?
As mentioned above, Sheridan will still have a huge footprint on Paramount’s TV and streaming outlets even as he winds down his TV deal over the next three years before moving full-time to NBCUniversal. In 2026 alone, three Yellowstone offshoots — The Madison and Dutton Ranch on Paramount+ and the first broadcast iteration of the franchise, Y: Marshals on CBS — are set to premiere. So is the Tulsa King spinoff NOLA King, starring Samuel L. Jackson, on Paramount+.
Landman, the streamer’s biggest show to date, earned a fast season three renewal after premiering in November, and a third season of Lioness is also in the pipeline.
How Will Mayor of Kingstown End?
Season four saw Mike’s (Renner) “control over Kingstown threatened as new players competed to fill the power vacuum left in the Russians’ wake, compelling him to confront the resulting gang war and stop them from swallowing the town,” as the official logline reads. “Meanwhile, with those he loves in more danger than ever before, Mike must contend with a headstrong new warden to protect his own while grappling with demons from his past.”
Paramount+ hasn’t released a season five logline yet, but the season four finale offers some clues. After Mike’s younger brother Kyle (Taylor Handley) took revenge on Aryan Brotherhood leader Merle Callahan (Richard Brake), viewers may wonder whether Kyle is truly becoming his older brother — and whether the prison gang will seek its own vengeance on Kyle. There are also open-ended questions about how Kingstown Crips leader Bunny (Tobi Bamtefa) will stop the encroachment of Colombian drug dealers into his territories, and whether an incarcerated Frank Moses (Lennie James) will be more of a terror for Kingstown while locked up than he was when was free.
Additional reporting by Demetrius Patterson.
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