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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: 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: 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.
