Taylor Sheridan's 5-Part Crime Thriller Has Just 8 Episodes To Prove The Critics Wrong

Published Oct 25, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020. While a lot of Taylor Sheridan’s shows have had their dust-ups with critics, the writer/director’s returning Paramount+ series has one last chance to redeem its ignominious reputation. With a lot of prolific writer/directors, viewers can be reasonably assured that they will either enjoy their work, or not find it all that engaging. However, this isn’t necessarily true of the Yellowstone franchise’s Taylor Sheridan. Sheridan first rose to prominence penning the screenplays for acclaimed dark thriller movies in the late 2010s, such as Sicario, Wind River, and Hell Or High Water. While all three movies operated in a Neo-Western space, they were different enough to appeal to a diverse array of viewers. Fittingly enough, Sheridan’s first and biggest TV hit, Yellowstone, marked a slight departure. While still gritty and R-rated, this saga about an amoral ranching family’s fortune was more melodramatic and soapier than Sheridan’s movies, calling to mind a darker spin on Dallas or Dynasty. Similarly, Sheridan’s next hit, the crime comedy Tulsa King, was far more self-aware, with a winking sense of humor that marked the show out as an anomaly in his screen canon. In contrast, Yellowstone’s prequels, the period Westerns 1883 and 1923, were much more melodramatic and self-serious, while his spy thriller Lioness marked a major genre shift from the king of Neo-Westerns. Then, there was his divisive crime drama Mayor of Kingstown. Mayor Of Kingstown Season 5 Will Only Have Eight Episodes Paramount+ Set in the titular fictional Michigan town, the Netflix hit Mayor of Kingstown follows Jeremy Renner’s taciturn, pragmatic protagonist Mike McLusky, a former prison inmate who has become a pivotal part of the town’s criminal underworld. Kingstown is home to seven prisons and, between them, the prisons themselves and the criminal gangs that populate them account for most of Kingstown’s economy. Thus, McClusky’s complicated role is to act as a middle man between the investors who own the prisons, the guards and wardens who run them, the criminal gangs who run things outside, the corrupt local cops, and the prisoners themselves. If that sounds like a complicated job, that’s because it is. Throughout Mayor of Kingstown’s first four seasons, Sheridan’s show gestures toward the sort of sprawling, polyphonic storytelling of earlier crime drama masterpieces like Oz and The Wire, where countless lives intersect across complex, flawed, and corrupt systems. The only problem is that, despite how bleak and downbeat Mayor of Kingstown might be, the show is not necessarily up to the tough task of depicting these broken systems in action. Like Sheridan’s more outlandish shows, such as Yellowstone and Lioness, Mayor of Kingstown is more interested in portraying Mike’s brooding power struggles with tough gangsters and glowering cops than really engaging with the reality of social ills like poverty, disenfranchisement, and widespread unemployment. Most viewers come to Sheridan’s shows for a fun time, rather than a realistic look at life on the streets in America, and this might not be a problem for shows like the oil business melodrama Landman. However, it is tough for Mayor of Kingstown to feel like fun escapism, since its prison setting makes the show inherently devastating and bleak, while its lack of insight into real-life systems of exploitation led critics to point out that the series feels pointlessly grim. This likely explains why, at the time of its 2021 debut, Mayor of Kingstown’s 53% critical rating represented the writer/director’s worst Rotten Tomatoes score to date. The show’s second season rating dipped as low as 50%, with critics calling Mayor of Kingstown too glum to be fun, but too simplistic in its morality to act as a meaningful interrogation of America’s broken policing and prison systems. Can Season 5 Turn Around Mayor Of Kingstown's Reception? via MovieStillsDB Now, to make matters worse for Sheridan’s show, 2027’s upcoming final season will only have eight episodes as opposed to the show’s usual ten. A shorter season would always have been bad news for Mayor of Kingstown, but the outing's brevity is made worse by the fact that season 5 is also the show’s final season. Even in an era when Sheridan has seven shows on the air and another on the way, Mayor of Kingstown’s run was still cut short by its cancellation and truncated final outing. It is tough to know whether season 5’s eight episodes could salvage Mayor of Kingstown’s critical reputation. While Yellowstone’s final season infamously killed off John Dutton and upended the entire status quo of the series in the process, Mayor of Kingstown doesn’t have a strong enough established ensemble to replace Mike as the show’s protagonist in its final outing. This leaves the creators in an unenviable bind, since keeping Mike alive makes the character feel indestructible and undermines the ostensibly life-or-death stakes of the crime drama. Where shows like The Wire regularly killed off some of their most beloved characters unceremoniously to underline the human cost of Baltimore’s drug trade, Mayor of Kingstown spent too much time turning Mike into an unstoppable action hero to take him down now. To be fair, Mayor of Kingstown’s critical reception has actually improved somewhat as the show continued, after hitting that 50% low in season 2. However, a shorter ending to a show that was already always criticized for lacking in depth doesn’t inspire hope, and nor does the general critical direction that Sheridan’s output has taken in the years since Mayor of Kingstown’s five-season run began in 2021. Mayor Of Kingstown Started Taylor Sheridan's Critical Struggles Image courtesy of Everett Collection Even though Mayor of Kingstown was Sheridan’s worst reviewed show when the series premiered, it didn’t stay that way for long. 2026’s maudlin family drama The Madison earned a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 63%, marginally lower than Mayor of Kingstown’s four-season average of 64%, while Yellowstone’s CBS sequel Marshals saw Sheridan hit a new low with a woeful 48%. Sheridan’s big-screen output was always more mixed in its critical reception than his shows, with 2021’s survival thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead earning only 63%. Meanwhile, 2023’s crime drama Finestkind earned an outright terrible 27% despite boosting rising star Jenna Ortega in a lead role. Since its inauspicious debut, both The Madison and Marshals have fared even worse on Rotten Tomatoes than Mayor of Kingstown, but the crime drama was still the series that marked the beginning of the end for his hot streak. Thus, it is hard to see Mayor of Kingstown season 5 turning things around with only eight episodes. Release Date November 14, 2021 Network Paramount+ Showrunner Dave Erickson Directors Stephen Kay, Guy Ferland, Christoph Schrewe, Clark Johnson, Paul Cameron, Tasha Smith, Taylor Sheridan Writers James Arcega Tinsley Creator(s) Hugh Dillon, Taylor Sheridan