‘Mayor of Kingstown’: Michael Beach Explains Why Kareem Is ‘Trapped’

[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers about Mayor of Kingstown, Season 3 Episode 8, “Captain of the S**t Out of Luck.”]

Anchor Bay has officially descended into chaos — again — on Mayor of Kingstown. This time, a grenade attack in the yard of AB leader and his minions has caused yet another disturbance in the delicate balance of crime bosses in Kingstown.

Things couldn’t be much worse for the prison’s warden, Michael Beach‘s Kareem Moore. He now has multiple guards working for other people, including his hopeful protege Kevin Jackson (Denny Love), who is secretly working for Bunny (Tobi Bamfeta), and Carney (Lane Garrison), who runs constant interference for Mike (Jeremy Renner), much to Kareem’s chagrin. On top of that, his home life is falling apart — now his daughter needs expensive therapy sessions for her trauma that stems from his still-wide-open mental wounds from the prison riot.

TV Insider caught up with Beach to talk about the character’s very unfortunate circumstances and find out why he’s so resistant to getting the help he needs.

Kareem has always tried to resist becoming an arm of the Mike McClusky machine. Why is it so important for him to maintain that separation?

Michael Beach: Well, I think if you go back to Season 1, he lives in the world of corruption, but — up until the point of the riot — he’s always found a way to maintain his separation between those two, his home life and his work life. And although he knows what’s going on and some things he lets slide and some things he won’t, he was able to find a way to maintain his neutrality so that he can live a happy life. The riot changed all of that, and it pretty much destroyed him. And now here in Season 3, it’s important for him to find himself again, to be the man that he was for the sake of his family because his home life is just completely falling apart.

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Do you think he has any clue that he’s being so thoroughly betrayed by his people? I mean, you’ve got Carney constantly working under the radar for Mike, and then now you’ve got Kevin doing subterfuge.

Yeah, that’s the whole thing. It’s so funny because he recruited this new group, and obviously, it’s just a small group, but Kevin is, again, in his mind, someone who can potentially help with the percentage-wise of good guys to bad guys. You know what I mean? If he can find enough guys who believe in what the system is supposed to be, what it started out as, then he might have a shot at somehow fixing the system. I don’t know if he ever thinks that he can, you know, completely get rid of corruption, but if he has more quality people who care about the system on his side then he could possibly do better.

The whole situation with Kevin, and especially how he is presenting himself, you think, “Oh, this might be one of the guys that I can nurture into staying away from the Carney side.” Although I think Carney is a good guy, he’s just much more — he believes in Mike’s way. He thinks that Mike is somehow making things better. And I just think Kareem, right or wrong, thinks he’s not making anything better, that he’s just keeping the status quo, and that’s not better, that’s just the same.

Speaking of Kareem mentoring Kevin, there’s a moment in Episode 8, where he talks about how, after the bombing incident, he says, “You know you can seek help.” But is he talking to himself in that moment?

Yeah, I think he is. I mean, he’s talking to both of them, but yeah, because again, he can never be Kevin anymore, right? Because of the years that have gone by, because of his experiences, because of the riot. I also think that he thinks that if he really did seek help himself, instead of pretending to seek help, that he might be in a better place.

So why doesn’t he? Why is he so against getting help?

I don’t think he’s against it. It’s just that the thing about Kingstown is that everybody’s trapped. Everyone thinks, “Oh, it’s just the prisoners whose lives suck.” The people watching the prisons are, too, and the families of the people watching the prisoners, their life sucks, too. And I mean, the whole economy is based on prisons. It’s not just one prison. It’s like five of them, so you can’t live in Kingstown and not be closely related to that prison in some way, or one of those prisons in some ways. So it’s like the whole thing with Mike and his mom and Kyle and all them. Because they say, “Well, why don’t you just leave? You could leave.” Kyle could have left and taken the other job. Mike could leave any time. And Mike tells Iris, “You should leave. You should get out of here.” But nobody leaves. They’re just trapped in this place: Purgatory.

(Stay tuned for more from TV Insider’s chat with Michael Beach next week.)

Mayor of Kingstown, Sundays, Paramount+