How long will Mayor of Kingstown last? A whole lot longer, according to Hugh Dillon, who co-created the series alongside Taylor Sheridan and stars in it as Ian.
He explained that the series, which is now in its third season, has been sketched out from start to finish… and now it’s just a matter of watching it all play out until the planned ending, with Season 7.
Dillon explained that while Mayor of Kingstown debuted after Yellowstone in the Taylor Sheridan universe, it was actually in the works first.
“Taylor Sheridan is my mentor. He coached me on probably 100 episodes of television. This was the first thing he ever wrote. So I’d go over to his house, he’d be coaching me… I’m from this town, I’ve always been a songwriter. I’ve taken stabs at writing, and I was like, I want to make take a stab at writing. I wanted to make a movie, and he’s like, ‘Where are you from again? What’s that now?’ And then he did some research, and he was like, ‘Holy s**t, there are nine penitentiaries!’” Dillon told TV Insider. “Even then, before it became a Taylor-verse with Yellowstone, he had it. Because I would go over there, I’d go, ‘This dude is special.’ Because he could disassemble characters and worlds just from scripts, and he’d bring it over to auditions, or we’d have to talk things through, and he couldn’t locate everything, all of it in a second.”
Dillon continued, “When it came to Mayor, we kind of etched out really quickly where this is gonna go, what the first episode was gonna look like. And it was never a question of if, it was always when. And then he had it: Mitch [Kyle Chandler] was going to die in the first 10 pages of Episode 1. And here’s where it ends: It’s episode 10 of Season 7. That’s how far advanced his mind could see it. And then it’s just us going back and forth on what the characters are, what happened.”
“What’s interesting about the way [Taylor] works is he starts with the end and then builds backwards,” Dillon added of Sheridan’s cohesive vision for the series’ entire run.
For Dillon, the show is extremely personal, as he drew from his real-life experiences and curiosities about where he is from when pitching it to Sheridan.
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“I grew up in a prison town. So when a serial killer would be arrested in Vancouver, you’re kind of vaguely aware of it. As a kid, I absorbed all that stuff because then all of a sudden, on the news, you realize, well, this monster is now moved to Kingstown where I’m from and is in the Kingstown penn, which is a mile from my house. I had friends [whose] dads were prison guards. It was the industry where I came from. So as a kid you absorb it, and I remember seeing the guard towers and thinking, ‘Is that Disneyland?’ And my parents said, ‘That is not Disneyland.’ So I had an innate curiosity about this world and the darkness, and I had years of struggling with heroin addiction and drugs. Those darker impulses, we built that into the show,” he explained.
Mayor of Kingstown, Sundays, Paramount+
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