Spoilers for Mayor of Kingstown Season 4, Episode 2 are ahead! You can catch up by streaming the series with a Paramount+ subscription.
This week’s episode of Mayor of Kingstown ended with a bang, literally. In the final seconds of the show, Mike’s ally in the prison, Carney, was killed. The garud was home with his dad when he was shot, and now his death could easily shake up the dynamic between Jeremy Renner’s Mike and Nina, the warden played by Edie Falco. However, before we find out how this jarring moment will ripple through the show, I asked the actor who played Carney what it was like to get the news about his character’s fate. He compared it to a scene in Kevin Costner’s Bull Durham.
Yes, the great baseball movie was named during Lane Garrison’s interview with me for CinemaBlend. And it actually makes a lot of sense. After telling him that the ensemble of another Taylor Sheridan show, 1923, learned about their deaths while reading the scripts, I asked the Kingstown actor how he found out about Carney’s fate. Speaking about the call he got, he explained:
One of our [executive] producers called me during the summer, and I sort of – I compared it to like Kevin Costner getting called into [Skip's] office in Bull Durham, where it's like, he already knows why they're saying ‘Hey Crash, get in here.’ You know, you see that look on his face where he’s like, ‘I'm hesitant. I know why you're calling me before you even call me.’
After hearing Garrison recall this moment, I pictured the scene toward the end of Bull Durham (which you can stream on Tubi) when Trey Wilson's Skip told Costner's Crash that the organization was making a change. Costner’s character was told that a younger catcher was being brought up, and that a good recommendation had been put in for him if he wanted to start managing. Then, Skip explained that this kind of choice is the way the business is. There’s nothing that can be done about it. In other words, that’s show biz.
Now, before that, the way Crash paused before he shut the door for the conversation and the look he gave, does feel like he had an inkling about what was coming his way. And that’s the point Garrison was making.
When he found out the producers wanted to talk with him, he knew something was up, as he explained to me:
My phone never rings from the exec producer, unless, like, there's a fire on set. So I kind of, as I picked it up and I was waiting, it's like, ‘We have good news and bad news. The bad news is we're killing you. The good news is we're going to find something else for you down the road, because we're doing some shows.’ But at least they prepared me to gear up, like, ‘Hey, don't get too settled in here, because that makes it even harder.’
I’m happy he had the chance to brace himself, because having this kind of update be a surprise would be hard. Garrison has experienced that too. He was in 16 episodes of Prison Break between 2005 and 2007, and he told me that when his character was killed off, he found out that it was happening as he was reading the script in his trailer.
Thankfully, this time, he was told about his character’s fate in advance, which gave him “moments to process it” and be OK with it. Now, as hard as it probably is, he can move forward to something else, just like Kevin Costner’s character had to at the end of Bull Durham.
Meanwhile, Mayor of Kingstown will move forward too on the 2025 TV schedule, and to see how Carney’s death impacts Season 4, you can stream new episodes on Paramount+ every Sunday.
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