Taylor Sheridan's Mayor of Kingstown, currently streaming on Paramount+, stars Jeremy Renner as a consultant who helps inmates and their families navigate life inside the multiple prisons in a small Michigan town. It's not the first gritty drama to explore the inner workings of a prison. Oz, which inaugurated the golden age of television on HBO, and Orange is the New Black, which marked the beginning of the streaming age, were set behind bars.
Kohan tried to find an answer for this question for her own show. "Piper was my Trojan Horse. You're not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women, and Latina women, and old women and criminals," she said in an NPR interview early in the show's run. "But if you take this white girl, this sort of fish out of water, and you follow her in, you can then expand your world and tell all of those other stories...
All of these shows resist these effects in various ways. But if the essential template always remains the same, the stereotypes gather force from repetition, despite any good intentions of the writers. Both Oz and Orange each conclude their season finales with one last scene for Tobias and Piper. So the Trojan Horse is never really left behind. We're still inside it.
Mike is not an inmate, and his storylines rarely take him inside the jail. Instead, he assists the police in dealing with the fallout of crimes that have causes that originate inside the prison but take place outside the walls. In the first season of Mayor of Kingstown, only two of the actors in the main credits, Aiden Gillen and Pha'Rez Lass, played inmates . Neither had much screen time, and Lass, who was excellent in his few appearances, isn't back for Season 2.