Beneath the Machine: The Intimacy Sheridan Leaves for Us to Discover
- Yasamin Dara
- May 31, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Set in a prison-infested fictional town in Michigan, Mayor of Kingstown centers on the machinery of control and the relentless cycles of power its characters are unable to escape. Rather than follow the classic Good vs. Evil binary, the series presents a more haunting vision: brutality not at the hands of a singular villain, but executed by an institutional engine—a machine.
Providing little to no incentive for viewers to root for a traditional “hero,” the show instead captures something far more primal: mercy, revealed through characters who are at once cruel and deeply capable of love.
Time and again, we indict individuals within fractured systems, holding them accountable for the collapse of the whole. Mayor of Kingstown inverts that instinct. It asks what happens when people are born into a structure that was never intended to be just—where rehabilitation is an afterthought and service is a fiction.
In a world so broken that the smallest act of civility becomes a form of rebellion, the characters we expect to hate are often the ones we find ourselves unable to condemn. Such conflict within us is not because they are innocent, but because they live in a reality where innocence no longer exists.
This is not a story of individuals who go astray. It is a story of corruption by design—and the quiet lie we tell ourselves: that deviation is what causes decay.
With its shifting allegiances, institutional violence, and psychological erosion, Mayor of Kingstown is often categorized as a crime drama or a study in systemic collapse. The chaos feels endemic—relentless. The trailers amplify it. The press capitalizes on it. And the audience—hooked—watches like fish drawn to the hypnotic shimmer of rot disguised as entertainment.
Yet beneath the brute force and institutional brutality lies another narrative—one far less marketed, far more enduring. It is the story that evades press cycles and slips past the algorithms of binge culture. A story carried not by spectacle, but by stillness. By conversations left unfinished.
And perhaps, it is the most resilient thread in the entire series.
It is the story of Mike and Iris.
This is not a relationship built on what is seen, but on what is withheld—on the deliberate refusal to cross a line. It does not follow the pattern of traditional romance, and that may be what gives it its power. Their bond is not rooted in possession or redemption, but in a quiet, mutual instinct to do the least amount of harm possible.
As viewers, we watch an actress breathe life into a character who is both trafficked and psychologically controlled. What stands out most about Emma Laird’s portrayal of Iris is its silenced self-awareness. She does not arrive as a woman with agency. She enters the story as a product—biologically female, trafficked, dressed for display, and handed to Mike like a trophy with assigned value.
Her performance lives in restraint. Her voice is soft, guarded. She never turns her back to a room. She lives in the silences between words. Iris is not performative. She is present. She is absorbing. She is surviving. She does not dramatize her trauma or seek sympathy. Instead, she inhabits it fully—and forces us to do the same.
Jeremy Renner’s portrayal of Mike McLusky is defined by control—decisive, unflinching, and quietly moral where it matters most. While his actions within the broader world of Kingstown often blur ethical lines, his treatment of Iris never does. From the moment she enters his orbit, something shifts. His demeanor becomes anchored in principle. Around her, Renner plays Mike not as a man desensitized by violence, but as someone who still recognizes innocence when the world insists it no longer exists.
There is nothing passive about his restraint. His choices—what he does not say, what he does not do—are acts of deliberate protection. His vulnerability in her presence is not a departure from his masculinity, but a profound expression of it. Every gesture, every refusal to exploit her vulnerability, becomes part of an unspoken ethic: her safety is not negotiable. And in a world where power is currency, Mike offers something far rarer dignity, given without condition and guarded without applause.
What makes the relationship between Iris and Mike exceptional—particularly in the hands of Laird and Renner—is how carefully it avoids the machinery of narrative romance. These are not characters written to heal each other. They are not symbolic opposites destined to resolve tension through physical or emotional release.
They are, instead, two people shaped by environments where connection is weaponized, where touch is transactional, and where care often precedes collapse. They do not trust easily. They do not offer softness without recoil. And yet, in the quiet of their scenes together, there emerges a form of recognition more profound than confession.
Neither character is easy to love—and neither offers love easily. But it is precisely this difficulty, this guardedness, that gives their interactions a kind of sacred weight. Every gesture withheld becomes an act of preservation. Every moment shared becomes a truce. They are not seeking rescue from one another. They are trying-quietly, and without language-to leave each other unbroken.
Taylor Sheridan’s writing demonstrates a rare understanding of human connection—particularly the kind that does not announce itself. The relationship between Mike and Iris resists the usual markers of closeness. It contains no physical consummation, no declarations of love, no moments staged for catharsis. What it offers instead is a study in proximity, in unspoken trust, in the precise psychological tension between vulnerability and protection.
This is not romance in any traditional narrative sense. It is emotional cohabitation without possession. And in a landscape where every relationship is transactional, the absence of motive becomes the deepest intimacy.
Sheridan refuses to sentimentalize their bond. He writes their connection as an ethical dilemma rather than an emotional arc. What does it mean to care for someone whose trauma cannot be undone? What does protection look like when it must exist without ownership? And can love-even unnamed-be credible when it is expressed only through silence, boundaries, and the refusal to act?
These questions are not rhetorical. They are the foundation of Mike and Iris’s dynamic. And in rendering their relationship with such restraint, Sheridan creates something startlingly rare on screen: a portrait of intimacy grounded in respect, patience, and a quiet, nearly impossible dignity.
In one of the most quietly powerful scenes, Mike moves through the kitchen as if the act of cooking were a private form of composition. His body language is efficient but not detached. Each motion-grating lemon zest, pouring batter, adjusting heat—is carried out with the discreet certainty of someone who knows what each gesture is meant to achieve. There is no flair. No improvisation. Just discipline, measured by instinct.
The space around him reflects that same balance: rough wood, exposed shelves, glass jars arranged in the kind of order that comes not from aesthetics, but from memory. This is not a house curated for others. It is a place built for one. And yet, every movement this morning betrays that he is no longer cooking only for himself.
The placement of the plate, the positioning of the cup, the symmetry of the scene-all of it signals intention, not decoration. There is a brief pause. A step back. A glance that lingers, not at the food, but at the gesture. At what it means to make something for someone who has only known the world as extraction.
His words are few. “Yeah,” he says, in approval that the table is ready. The scene operates on another register. It is the emotional equivalent of stepping aside-not just physically, but psychologically-so that someone else can exist without fear in a space you have made.
And what passes between them is a temporary suspension of survival mode: a man who has spent his life controlling outcomes, and a woman who has spent hers being controlled, locked together in a moment that asks for nothing more than to be quietly shared.
Sheridan’s Discipline on the Page
Taylor Sheridan is no stranger to emotional subtext. In Yellowstone, Hell or High Water, and Wind River, he builds entire universes from masculine silence and moral ambiguity. But in Mayor of Kingstown, he pushes further.
Mike is not written as a hero. He is written as a man who has already failed—a man who wakes up every day trying not to fall apart. The same applies to Iris. She is not seeking rescue. She is seeking a reprieve.
And Sheridan gives them that—but only briefly.
There is a scene where the two stand on a boat. It is sunlit. It is still. It feels like it does not belong in the show. Because it does not.
It is a dream. A hallucination of what might have been, if the world were different.
Renner’s performance as Mike is deeply physical. He plays the character like someone who has not exhaled in years. His shoulders are tight. His voice is flat, but heavy. His eyes—especially in scenes with Iris—are always halfway to breaking.
He does not act for the camera. He holds back. And in doing so, he invites us in.
Emma Laird’s vulnerability is never naive. She gives us trauma without turning it into spectacle. Her moments of stillness—especially when she speaks about a real date—are where her entire performance lifts off the page.
Together, they carry a story that is never spoken aloud. A connection that survives in glances, in silences, in boundaries that never get crossed.
They are not whole, and never will be—but in each other, they are at least not erased.
